


The Cat Came Back

by Xogoi_Momo



Series: Big Kitty Goth Boyfriend [3]
Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Altered Mental States, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - Kemonomimi, Alternate Universe - Laboratory, Animal Ears, Animal Instincts, Animal Traits, Bureaucracy, Canon Het Relationship, Cat/Human Hybrids, Cockblocking, Codenames, Cold War, Cooking, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Erotic Poetry, F/M, Family Feels, Family Reunions, Father-Son Relationship, Films, Ghosts, Glasses, It's Not Femdom if It's The Boss, Kemonomimi, M/M, Minor Original Character(s), Muteness, Ocelot Family Feels, POV Multiple, PoV Cosmonaut, Possession, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Reading Aloud, Revolver Ocelot is a Major Cinephile, Siesta Time for Cat-People, Smoking, Spirits, Stealth Cameo - Freeform, Team as Family, Workplace Relationship, being a spirit medium is "poll the audience" 24/7, moon's haunted, sometimes it isn't cowboy time, stumbling across your father's erotic poetry
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2020-09-14
Packaged: 2021-02-25 00:55:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 32,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22007308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xogoi_Momo/pseuds/Xogoi_Momo
Summary: Adam isnotthe guy to talk his mother out of a revenge mission, and Jack and the rest of Mom's heavily-armed weirdo friends barely had to be invited.Well, Dad's a little sad about it, but "a little bit sad" is pretty much just Dad, you know?
Relationships: Big Boss/Ocelot, The Boss/The Sorrow (Metal Gear), The Fury & The Sorrow (Metal Gear), The Joy/The Sorrow (Metal Gear)
Series: Big Kitty Goth Boyfriend [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1258787
Comments: 55
Kudos: 37





	1. Hang in There, Baby

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Precious Baby Kitten](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13510785) by [Not_You](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Not_You/pseuds/Not_You). 



Reluctantly, Adam had taken his claws off of the older ocelot-man he was holding down, the first intruder to the Cobras' hidden jungle installation. He'd sussed out the cat-smelling thing in the bushes and gotten to the hypothesis that it was another beast who walked on two legs. A lab-made monster meant that it could be on someone else's leash, here to sniff out Adam and his brand-new mom and her bizarre (but not animal-people) friends and send him back to a laboratory prison of concrete and metal. 

When the Boss commanded him to halt, it was an intellectually reasonable decision, even if his instincts had urged him to keep fighting. He'd only been in her company for a couple of months at that point, but Adam had already known that his mother was more likely to call a time-out for an interrogation than for bleeding-hearted mercy toward an enemy.

Then there had been a revelation, an awkward truce and a formal introduction, after which Adam still didn't know what he should expect from his father. 

He'd never expected to have a father at all; growing up, Adam had heard plenty about his--his _sire,_ from the keepers, and all of that intel had been firmly in the past tense. Some of it had been in offhanded comparisons, how Adam should have been more cooperative like his father had been, or more careful with his hygiene or his claws, or how they should have already assumed that Adam wouldn't be able to talk either, knowing the faults of his bloodline. 

Nobody had started out afraid of young Adam, in a way that you couldn't just explain by him being a towheaded little kitten-boy, skinny and big-eyed with no chance of growing up into a roaring bruiser like the tiger kids. Instead, one of the older humans had sat next to Adam and taught him how to shuffle cards, after inspecting the pads of his pink little hands, and had gone on to tell him stories, over games of Go Fish, about all the times his progenitor broke the bank of cigarettes and ration tickets at the poker table.

Adam had discovered that his late father was the biggest reason his captors had been pulling their punches. Years ago, the scientists had learned at least one lesson in the care and handling of things that were almost-sometimes people. Adam's father had been Subject 0051, as pictured in grainy photo reproductions, a human-ocelot hybrid with good overall health and outstanding renal function. 0051 was limited in field application, due to poor manual dexterity and absent verbal ability, but won points for compliance and temperament, making excellent breeding stock... the latter so much so, alas, that the prototype ocelot-man had gone and killed himself for love. 

Adam had heard different versions of that story, dipped from different points in the burbling stream of institutional gossip. Sometimes Fraidy Cat slit his wrists when Hybrid 00's human dam left the compound, her side of the transaction completed and a poor lovesick idiot left behind. Sometimes the ocelot-man waited dutifully for his queen, but chewed open a vein in despair after they took away his kitten. That had been for Adam's own good, though. Imagine growing up in the same cage with _that:_ a mute, wild cat-thing that gripped you tight in its forepaws and hissed and wouldn't let anyone else come near. 

There had been the quick addendum: the scientists in this hypothetical scenario would be coming near to make sure the helpless little ocelot kitten was all right, of course. Adam had wondered how feral and mindless someone really could have been, someone who's also described as a good boy who always held still when he was told and used the potty _and only the potty_ without being reminded. He had also wondered how his mother could hike up her fatigues and bind up her breasts and follow orders on to her next assignment, just like that, yet also be the whispered-about reason that his keepers were moving him to a different laboratory, again, in the middle of the night when humans would rather be asleep. How his mother could have written him off, her job done here, but still be the reason he needed to take this pill--OK, fine, at least stick his arm out for the jab like a good kitten if he's not going to climb into the goddamn crate on his own.

But that was the problem with a tale told by multiple authors: keeping the characters consistent. As a kitten-boy, Adam had been quick to teach himself to make his eyes big and round and interested, and nod in a way that a storyteller would think was tentative agreement, so he could get a little more of the story and maybe sift through it to find another of the real puzzle pieces. What he'd put together in his head, he'd known better than to share. He had kept the not-so-amazing secret of his capability for normal human speech. That had started as childish perversity, but shaped itself into a sound strategic decision. All the other things Adam had gone on to learn about himself, his conjectures about the world that came from them, could be kept completely to himself, safe behind that barrier--and if nobody expected you to speak, it had followed next that they'd expect you to keep secrets, and that there was so much dead air for them to fill.

Left to his own thoughts, Adam had considered what it would be like to be wrapped up snug in someone's arms, just like the people in the movies that were shown to good animal-children, and the people in the storybooks that were for everyone, and like he _knew_ he'd once been hugged by Fraidy Cat, based on corroborative eyewitness testimony. Sometimes Adam had pretended that the arms around him were from a mother and sometimes that they were furry ones, but he always knew the difference between a real memory and something you've imagined enough times. You could still enjoy the pretend memory, as long as you remembered the difference. 

One of Adam's quiet-time hobbies at the lab had been putting together an imaginary life to think about. That was a life where he wasn't alone, although he was the only one really there, because he had to keep it safe inside his head where nobody else could know. The imaginary life where there were arms wrapped around him was also the life where he was a little blond boy with no extra holes in his pants, with a big blonde mother and a less-big but still bigger-than-him father who also had regular pink round ears like his son, and a bedroom where all the walls were real walls and the door only locked from the inside.

Sometimes that not-life, the one about parents and a house like in the teenager movies they got for Movie Night, would get blended into Adam's other favorite not-life, which of course was the one where he was a cowboy. 

In the last few years before he was rescued, the men had been getting their shirts ripped and being tied up a lot more in the cowboy not-life. That was in between all the gunfights they had, just like he'd been practicing for back in real, boring life, except that if Adam were Sheriff they'd finally have to let him have bullets for his gun. After the imagined gunfights and wrasslin' and dunking cowboys in the water trough, it wasn't hard to take that fuzzy blonde space where his mother ought to have been and move the whole Happy Life house right into Cowboy Life, giving her bold colors and a gunbelt like Joan Crawford in _Johnny Guitar._ She and Subject 0051, with a checkered shirt and a bandana around his neck, would lean on the big wooden fence next to each other while they waited for their son, the sheriff, to mosey back to the ranch for dinner.

Sometimes when the not-lives blended like that, his father would be a Red Indian instead. Spotted Cat would ride out to meet his son on the way in, a silent trapper with a wildcat pelt on his fringed jacket and a beaded headband that helped to fudge the ear issue in Adam's mind's eye, although he was well enough practiced by then that he could imagine all kinds of things and still keep quietly doing, or not doing, whatever it was the scientists had on the agenda for today.

After all, being quiet had been almost as good as being Good, back in the lab; a lot of the time they were one and the same. If the scientists had ever found out that Adam could talk, they would have had nobody else but themselves to blame for his silence, really; how was a little kitten-boy supposed to know that they meant "be quiet _right now?"_

That would have been a satisfying argument, and Adam had always hoped to deliver it out loud, one day, in front of an open door and behind a smoking pistol. In the meantime, the scientists had noted down on the clipboards how quickly Hybrid 00 could field-strip a Makarov today vs. yesterday, and whether yesterday being Movie Night was the reason that today was one of the Good Behavior days. They never considered that Adam was fishing out the recoil spring and nodding his agreement on autopilot, much more invested with the not-life hidden in his head where he was leading a laboratory escape and vanishing into the night, flames flickering in the background like Rome burning in _Quo Vadis._

Real life hadn't turned out exactly like that. His mother had Sent For Him, it turned out, just as if Adam were really the lost prince in his fairy tale not-life, which was one of the very earliest ones he'd constructed. Her man Jack had suddenly appeared in the darkness and solitude of Adam's cage, and had been almost entirely unlike Errol Flynn if you looked him square in the solid, stubbly face. Their one-sided conversation had been a nonstarter, but Jack's confident movements when jumping and climbing had started to make him out much more like Robin Hood or a pirate on the rigging, and although it turned out to be a military-issue sneaking suit, he'd been wearing the closest thing Adam had ever seen, in real, palpable life, to leather fencing breeches.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Third and probably final entry in this series; all based, of course, off of [Precious Baby Kitten](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13510785/chapters/30987597) by Not_You. If you haven't read that story, it helps with setup and is also chronologically first. (It's also a pretty good story.)
> 
> Adam Ocelot likes cowboy movies best, but he's seen plenty of other ones.


	2. Ceiling Cat Is Watching You

The first thing Adam learns about his parents (and granted, this comes in two installments, one a few months after the other) is that huh, he _has_ parents. The real first thing he learns is that they love him, individually and together, which is... for as much time as Adam's applied himself to imagining a family in his head, with the fantastic backdrop of a ranch or a castle or a spaceship or a suburban home, the real thing feels even stranger. 

This peculiar familiarity comes back to him with the feeling of a new revelation every time. They're in the surreal setting of a jungle Spec Ops freak militia camp, along with the man who might be Adam's first boyfriend, all sharing the evening meal around the same table. The table is made of rough-hewn logs and there's nothing above it but leaves and sky, the man on Adam's other side is partially eclipsed in a cloud of hornets, but everyone's eating what they want and nobody's shackled to anything. In between the sounds of military-efficient dining and salt-passing, the Cobra Unit is listening to Adam's report of how he and Jack caught tonight's supper. 

Across the table, Tristan and the Boss are sitting next to each other, leaning together but in a censor-approved way, like it's _Father Was a Fullback_ with Fred MacMurray and Maureen O'Hara as the parents and Adam's telling them how he's won a scholarship, even though in real life he's only describing the snare he and Jack built. There isn't much else new in the jungle today, so maybe that's why they look enthralled. Dad waits until the story's over before he peels himself away to finish the dishes, and Mom settles back, producing the second half of one of her cigars and holding it offhandedly for the Fury to relight. Dad doesn't seem to mind that, as fraught with implications as the lighting of a lady's smoke is supposed to be.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

...Dad might not _know_ that he should mind that, actually; Adam found out early on that the kemonomimi lab hadn't always put on a Movie Night for its little monsters. That was one of the junior scientists' projects, an elegant combination of reward and social education. Back when Dad was inside, it was simpler: dope and shocks and the hose, for the bad kitties. For the good ones, they got the absence of punishment and occasional salmon fillets. Dad, the big nerd, had earned a real human bed with a mattress on it for being so very reliably good; even freed, he couldn't help a shameful pride showing as his fuzzy fingers described it to Adam. Dad hadn't liked the mattress for its comfort, not compared to flopping his ocelot spine over the cage's bolted-in tree branch, but it had been a recognition of his efforts and _that_ was rare enough to be savored.

"When I was emplaced with the Project, we reinvestigated the advantages of a conventional bed," Mom had interjected, not at all ashamed of eavesdropping and certainly not for setting the record straight. Dad had just beamed, the usual goofy smile he makes when Mom's around and says basically anything to him. Since Adam's been spending time around his biological family, he's figuring out that his wildcat uncooperative nature--the instinct to fight that bristled at any affront to his dignity and tended to end up with Hybrid 00 getting strapped to a board for _everyone's_ safety--has a lot more to do with Mom's genetic contribution than Dad's.

Dad's still the source of Adam's claws, and those have been pretty goddamn useful, even as a laboratory specimen with redundant layers of safety precautions between him and the other assholes. Sometimes Hybrid 00 was a Good Boy instead and did what he was told, while Adam wandered off deep into his imaginary world and chased cattle rustlers until it was time for Good Boy Movie Night and/or smoked fish dessert. A Good Boy with built-in razor blades got extra credit for not actually _using_ them on the nice scientists, maybe even double if he'd been truculent the day before and seemed to be turning over a new leaf today.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

Of course, senior claw-monster Tristan understands how useful it is to have nimble human fingers, the ones he couldn't stop staring at when Adam first met him, at least as soon as Adam unwrapped his hands from around Dad's neck. Luckily, Dad doesn't seem to hold grudges much. He's also got some kind of strange buddy-buddy thing going with the Fury, so maybe that's another reason Dad doesn't mind it when the crispy critter takes over the husbandly duty of lighting the Boss' smoke. If he were the kind of man, or cat-man, to let his pride get wounded over a strictly practical matter, maybe Mom wouldn't have been so happy to keep Dad around after Adam found him skulking in their bushes.

Adam isn't sure if she meant it as a test anyway, the first time she held out her stogie like a silent command and let the team pyromaniac do the honors right in front of her long-lost lover. Mom, at leisure, smokes cigars that look like dog turds someone was chewing on. It's not the same as a sleek Bakelite cigarette holder to wave around for emphasis like Bette Davis in _All About Eve._ (If Mom did have one of those, Adam couldn't guarantee that she'd have sole use of it for long.) The Boss has been making up for lost time with Adam's education in the family business, so this could just be an object lesson in the importance of delegating to your best soldier for the task--and in not letting your commands be questioned. 

If anyone tried to light _Jack's_ cigarette for him--Adam can already feel himself tensing up to jump in and hand them their own thyroid. He knows that's not constructive, but he's not even going to work on it. All right, he is going to work on it. Mom wants a cohesive fighting unit, Dad wants everyone to get along, and Jack isn't going to make the first or even the second move on anyone; Q.E.D. Besides, the Fury is innocent; sad case that he is, he isn't trying to start shit other than fires, and when they're not on the battlefield or getting ready for breakfast, his best opportunity is his comrades' smokes.

There isn't a Mrs. Fury somewhere back in Belarus, but it doesn't really seem like there's a Help Wanted sign hung up, either. Even with a wildcat's curiosity, Adam hasn't tried to find out if the necessary apparatus for baby Furies is still cleared for liftoff; being horrifically and comprehensively burned seems like a symptom, not a cause, of the Fury's general fucked-uppedness. Adam's watched two different _The Phantom of the Opera_ adaptations and also _House of Wax,_ so he can credit the experimental biologist who had a thing for horror movies, back at the lab, for this insight into the scarred-up and vengeful. Movie Night _was_ always supposed to be educational for their little monsters.

On his mom's part, "Fury" was a good pick for code names, too. Adam doesn't imagine that the Fury had to do any lobbying to the Boss, not like the Fear must have had to do in order not to end up as "The Huge Amount of Effort." The Fury stays at a constant, low seethe, but he doesn't seem _specifically_ furious that Adam is a queer, or that Adam's doing his level best to corrupt his older comrade Jack. The Fury either ignores or doesn't notice their displays of affection just the same as he tolerates Mom and Dad when they start to get cuddly by the campfire. Not for him, thanks, especially when the fire's right there.

Adam's not sure if he should be trying to get the jump on his own code name, or if picking it out himself is the kind of thing that will twig his mother's entirely human but still formidable stubbornness. "The Revenge" is a front-runner; it isn't an emotion, but neither is "The End," or, for that matter, "Snake" or "The Boss." Adam rolls his eyes; Zorro never had this kind of problem keeping up his personal brand.

"Hrrm," Jack interrupts, surfacing from his own deep thought. "What about 'The Ocelot?' It makes a bunch of sense, and the Boss already made your dad have a regular name, so it wouldn't be confusing. Well, 'Tristan' is an old-fashioned name, but it isn't, hmm. An adjective, or a noun--wait. Hmm. It isn't a _code_ name. ...I guess it could still be confusing, having two guys who are actually part ocelot, and you can _tell,_ but only one of them's named 'The Ocelot.' Your dad would probably be all right with you being the one to have it, though."

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

Here in the tropical Eden Adam's mother has established for all of them, the virgin seducing the snake was a weeks-long process, in fits and starts of bringing Jack fresh kill and scent-marking his belongings pungently enough for a full-human to be able to tell. Even after all that hard work, Adam had to escalate it to a naked midnight pounce in order for Jack to be _sure,_ but it all worked at the end, and Adam's willing to chalk it up as a learning experience, and pretty good for a first time.

Adam is, after all, the second-generation result of crossing the perfect ambush predator with a persistence predator that spends way too much of its precious glucose fueling an oversized brain. His seduction of Jack was, he'll admit now, irregular and poorly-planned, when it was planned at all. He's been distracted by _those_ feelings before, but this was the first time Adam was in a position to do anything about his crush, and maybe he should have been paying less attention to Robert Michum's horsemanship in _West of the Pecos_ and more attention to exactly how it was that the Colonel's daughter managed to seduce him before it was time for the credits.

Until the culmination of his efforts with Jack, there was only one mated pair of Cobras, Tristan and the Boss. For all that he also ends up half-naked with his tail ticking back and forth (in the same sweeping rhythm as Adam's) Dad, at first glance, comes across as the kind of guy whom sex happens _to._

The Boss seems well-enough pleased with his efforts, though. Adam's seen her with a spring in her step, the morning after she's wrung out a midnight concert on her instrument of choice. On those days, Mom wears a smug little smirk that's as cat-like as she gets, and it comes with a matching smile on Dad and love bites on the back of her neck, right where you'd scruff her if scruffing a full-human did anything and if you weren't afraid of drawing back a stump from the Mother of Special Forces.

Adam knows he's not afraid of much, and that his mother doesn't seem to be afraid of anything. Dad, who used to have an entire installation of demi-ethical scientists calling him Fraidy Cat, is doing well enough for himself out here in the fresh air, at Mom's side or on a tree branch slightly above and behind her. Maybe there's a proximity effect; it works the same way that the Cobras need their commander and the same way that Jack has no problem taking initiative, now that he's been given the unambiguous go-ahead that initiative is there to be taken.

Adam hasn't spent so long at the lab's Movie Night that he thinks movies are exactly how the real world works, and the films always gave much more attention to star-crossed courtships than they did to happy marriages.


	3. вжух | fwoosh

Tristan is the newest soul among the Cobra Unit, elite soldiers to whom a recruit is already an unusual occurrence. It is no more or less unusual that their recruit is a cat-man with a long, stripey tail. 

The most correct name for his cat-aspect is _ocelot,_ which the Fury recalls, vaguely, having learned as _otselot._ Either word describes a small kind of big cat, yellowish with black blotches, spots and stripes. Cats do not mind what they are called; assigning rules to Nature, and expecting them to be obeyed, is Man's arrogance.

The Boss has now brought her company with her to the land of the ocelots, for the very reason that it _is_ their land, although the ocelots do not rule in the place of their birth. There are bigger cats in this jungle, and there are bears and there is Man, with guns and spears, but this place is where Nature has first set the ocelots, and so this is the place where the Boss has taken her boy, and where she has found her man again. 

The Boss is a rational actor who understands the forces around her, which of them will bend to her will and the ones to which even she must bend. The Fury does not fault her decision. He is responsible to himself, as all men must be, but it goes well to have a captain who can give direction to your works in the world. Some men do not need a governor. That is their own nature, whether they have mastered themselves or whether they are not burdened with understanding that all lives are a dream of walking ashes, in a world that is only waiting for the flame.

The Fury suspects that the last case is most common. She does not need to be an anchor for the lost, either, not for the Fury. Perhaps for the others, and that is fine. They occupy her Hill sphere as her gravity synchronizes their orbits, as is the nature of satellites around their dominant body. This would make young Adam a regular moon, formed naturally in and of the Boss and now also locked into her orbit.

The Boss is a good commander. She is a good warrior and likely a good woman, although perhaps not a good person. And perhaps not a good _woman;_ the Fury does not have hairs to split about the material flesh that will soon enough return to ashes and dust, before or after the soul departs. Still, he is aware that some men do, and aware that he does not wish to bother with the specifics. The Boss is not man or woman to the Fury, not when she is walking Purpose, a single, clarifying connection to the indifferent world. She is a good leader.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

Young Adam is a cat-man of the same ocelot type as his father, and he has been with the Cobra Unit long enough for his strange appearance to become unremarkable among their other strange appearances. So it is that Tristan has come to them already familiar in his strangeness. He is more of the jungle cat than is Adam, who is formed like his father but does not have whiskers like Tristan does, or fur on his arms and down the center of his back, the soft golden fur that brings a purr when it is stroked gently and in the correct direction.

Having a similar yet dissimilar shape is a usual thing for parents and their offspring, although it is not usually in the cat-man way, which makes the differences more notable. Tristan is Adam's father and the Boss' man. So are they all, here, but the Boss keeps a separate, personal interest in her son and in her lover. The Fury knows that this is also the way of Nature. The Boss is a rational human and does not enter into familial habits without awareness, nor does she cast her responsibility aside, although it would be easier in her life to ignore it. This is well.

Adam is a young man, more a human than a not-human, but so are many of the other Cobra men. He burns with a young man's desire for glory and the hungers of the flesh. The Fury knows that he is not to be Adam's teacher, not like Time will be. Adam feeds on the body of Jack, and Jack is also a young man who has not fully learned of suffering. Adam's carnal passion is of a type that will create no more lives to be taken from the dark void and sentenced to a mortal flesh-prison, which is good. Adam did not choose his species of desire, so the Fury does not congratulate him on the direction. It is preferable, but the Fury does not judge the Boss, in turn, for creating Adam's life in the manner of men and women. The world is what it is; everyone will end in ashes regardless of what or who you cling to. Earlier or sooner, no matter what a man thinks or does, or what genitals are pressed into service.

Adam has been granted his name by the Boss, which is the usual way of mothers and children and does not require contemplation. The Fury is not so young in the People's Republic that he is ignorant of the Bible, and not so old as to raise that set of specifics above any others. The Lord may come with his chariots like a whirlwind, to render his anger with fury and his rebuke with flames of fire, but the Fury knows that fire will come, Lord or none, and the resting state of matter is ashes.

Tristan has been also been given his name by the Boss. This is _not_ the usual way of husbands and wives, but it is no matter; the Fury respects her decision. Tristan has had nicknames and catalog numbers, just as the Fury had a name assigned at the beginning of a life that he no longer supports, and the numbers that were attached to that name for record-keeping by his own would-be masters. The Fury even had a title, once: a flurry of ranks from the patron that gave him his numbers and gave him his wings.

The wings, and then the cruel stupidity of this old patron, gave him the Vision that gave him his nature, and led to the parasites who have been nothing but kind to him, who give him his deeper communion with the flames. "The Fury" is a designation and a title and a summary, and so it also serves well for a name. The Boss was the one who gave it to him, just as she named Tristan by looking at him, _seeing_ and describing him out loud, to the universe. Her own vision is very good. 

There is one other name for Tristan, not the stock control number from the laboratory that made him, nor the insulting nickname they gave their own creation. ("Fraidy Cat," the Boss said once, parenthetically. It made Tristan show the tips of his fangs in a happy-sad smile while the Fury felt the novelty of burning with a rage that was not his own.)

Tristan is a good companion; this understanding, too, is a novelty for the Fury. Silence at his side as he works or thinks or burns is usual for the Fury, but this is silence in the form of a man. A cat-man, but that is the nature of the Cobra Unit. Tristan is human-not-human, which does not bear remarking on in this squad, but in his ocelot way he is a human-other, not a human- _not_ like the Fury is. 

The Fury speaks and speaks and Tristan listens--a mute, yes, but a mute who has leave to go when he wishes, who can meow for attention when events require a break in the Fury's soliloquy. The Fury has been talking to himself for years. It was helpful to speak out loud when he worked out vectors on the map. When he brought concerns to the highest ministers he could and was dismissed, he may as well have been talking to himself, and then he wore the helmet and spoke apologies and abjurations where only he and the accusing dead could listen.

He does not wear his helmet in the jungle heat. What purpose does it have when he is working only with the obedient flame of a cooking fire? The habits of wearing a helmet stay with him, and that is all that is necessary for his comfort, when the fire is not reaching out for him. The Fury speaks to the dead who are with him, quietly when they are weak, but indecorous screaming when it is necessary. Over and over, he tells them of the past. They were there, and he was there, but words are what he can bring.

"I submitted my concerns to the Bureau, exactly per their protocol. I submitted them until they answered. The safety measures were not implemented; the design was unaltered. It would have been _too costly_ to fix it, so soon to launch. So late after I submitted my concerns, but not so late after they were finally _reviewed._ I would not send my men up! I could not send them, not after that, so I went myself. My only request was an open casket at my funeral. The worst happened--more than the worst! _I have had no funeral."_

The Boss has said in her briefing that Tristan sees the dead, and the Fury is alive, still alive, to his chagrin. Tristan does not appear to judge the Fury, even as he watches with his sad, grey eyes; he does not look at the Fury like a normal man looks at a fool or a madman, and he does not _go_.

Tristan's hand-words are difficult beyond the habit of a smoked-glass mask, but when the scales fall and the Fury can see, he learns that Tristan understands the screaming, glaring dead, but that Tristan's own dead are not that way. Tristan's dead are sad and plaintive and capable of forgiving. The Fury does not believe that this means they each see different spirits; two men may find the same bird, yes, but the artist remembers its feathers while the musician repeats its song.

Tristan's paws are strong and soft. The words they sign are muffled in softness; strong words, like the Cobra Unit's battle-signals, come through like a shout comes through a helmet, but the more delicate concepts are hidden in golden fur. So it is that sometimes he does not hand-speak at all, like now. His paws touch the Fury and it is not like battle; the pads of his hands are warm and dry and as hot as his heart. One rests on the Fury's arm, and then, after a soft moment, the paws surround his head, careful in the places where there are reminders of the Fury's ears.

The Fury remembers a cat.

There had been a cat that was tested for the capsule. The cat was a good crewman as far as submitting to an ear-scratching or holding still for measurements when it could see food in the periphery, but a cat has neither patriotism nor career aspirations. Once the razors and needles began, it put its efforts into escaping, not politics.

They sent dogs up instead. The dogs were happy to help and lived until they burned when there was oxygen, or choked when there was not. 

This was exactly the kind of help that the Central Committee wanted. Too soon, too soon, they conveyed their congratulations to the scientists of the Project who were relieved and planned to send men. The Fury awoke to his duty, then, and stopped it in the only way he could. 

The Fury got into the capsule instead. Behind him he left his men and he left his word and for it all, he _burned--_ he is still burning.

Alone, together, silent, Tristan looks into the Fury's eyes and shares with him his other, secret name, the one he made for himself--and only himself--before the Boss captured his orbit into her gravity. 

_Sorrow._

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

The Fury destroys wood and vine, burning Earth's fuel to make its animals into meat into food, to nourish the bodies of the Cobras and the flames to nourish the tiny bodies of his unseen passengers. Destruction feeding life again, but how is that strange? Since they are alive, let them be alive well, and since the Fury has hands and fire, let him use them to the betterment of Man.

The Sorrow's passions burn cooler and slower, though his cat's paws are nimble enough for kitchen police and his man's mind is alert to over-boiling. It is good for them to be yoked together; after the Fury's fire has burned down to a smoulder, the Sorrow continues diligently until the work is complete. It is also good because scrubbing out the mess pots with soap and water has always made the regrown skin of the Fury's hands crack and bleed. The Sorrow can listen to the human spectacle from a distance easily enough with his ocelot's communication array. It is thus that he does not suffer, following his nature and his will to do the washing-up while the rest of the Cobra Unit stays at the table after dinner, talking when they should be digesting.

The Fury sits at an equal distance, neither ignoring the discussion to which he is not contributing, nor leaving a lone comrade behind. Conversation is nearly always irrelevant; a thinking man realizes the things that are and does not need to be reminded that they continue to be. The future can of course be affected by conscious action, but only in such ways as Nature allows, so it is also not a matter worth the discourse. The Fury has a pilot's insight on their local wind patterns, but he has no control over them, and no airship to keep safe in the first place.

Today's topic is more interesting, as it has been for several days. Young Adam is relishing his elders' combined attention as he passes along his experience in the cat-man laboratories. At first Adam did not speak of his captivity, which was also his childhood; he looks to the future with a single-mindedness the Fury recognizes in one of the young cat-man's parents. It is not a wildcat's ferocity.

No, the laboratory stories are more like briefings. Meals, laundry, testing: these are mundane actions, everyday routines in which they will still find the scientists and the other prisoners, the cat-men whose mothers do not command Special Ops units. To an outside perspective, daily chore delegations will be as important as troop movements.

"Naw, they just pointed me at the shower and I'd usually do it," Adam shrugs. "Unless I didn't want to, but, well, water's water and there wasn't much swim time, so I'd go along. Now, back when Dad was in, he said they'd take him in weekly, cold-water spraydown in leather two-points with a rifle across the room, because they can't use that cattle prod in the water. And that was just for fuckin' _Dad!_ I was in, there was this hyena kid who actually ate a guy's finger, and they still gave her yard time. I mean, not right away. Also the guy deserved it, but that never counts."

"Dad" to Adam is the Boss' Tristan, his own and the Boss' and now the Fury's Sorrow, a thinking being with human dignity and an understanding of the world and his own nature. This man, a cat on two legs, has stopped scrubbing off scorched corn husks and his paws are motionless in the basin, while he does not even make eye contact with his beloved son. The Sorrow's smile is holding in place; there are fine tremors near his temples, which his whiskers help to betray. Off in another place, maps and other pieces of tinder are rustling on the camp table; the Fear pokes his finger at something he's wrested away from the End.

"...hey, you even listening here, Fury? This is a whole crusade if we do it; Boss doesn't want to engage unless we're unanimous."

The Fury has listened enough, enough to get lost in the embers while the words crackled on outside of him. The Fear knows the Fury's nature well enough, but he has too much energy, too much love of the world to truly understand. He is a good comrade and knows how to meet the Fury where he must be met, and that is well enough. The Fury pulls his thoughts out of the fire and turns to address the gathered Cobra Unit, to give his go-ahead for launch, but his eyes are for his friend, the Sorrow.

"They will burn," we all will burn, as the world burns the passion of life from flesh and leaves insensate ash. That is inevitable, but for this, the Fury does not want to wait. There is a need, and the fire is rising up within him again. _"I_ will burn them."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tip of the cosmonaut helmet to Vladimir Komorov, Marcus Aurelius, and [the Wizard Cat.](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/whoosh-%D0%B2%D0%B6%D1%83%D1%85) This chapter is longer than anything, so I'm going to pretend that's a style choice.


	4. I'm an asshole. I wear fur.

Adam has already shared his childhood stories with Mom; she'd found out that he could speak (whoops) while they still had plenty of travel time left, on the way to the hideout. Mom's never one to cry, so when they get to the bad parts, she just sets her jaw with more and more muscle. There's a steely look in her eyes that comes with it, sometimes far-off and full of purpose, like Jennifer Jones in _The Song of Bernadette,_ and it all confirms to Adam that the lab techs who told him that she voluntarily handed over her semi-human baby were _wrong_. Mom also doesn't tend towards physical affection; some of that's her nature, but it sounds like it didn't take a lot of doing to train the rest out of her, back when she was a young child herself. She didn't have claws and fangs built in, so Mom got to arming herself as soon as the opportunity presented.

Dad, on the other hand, is the kind of guy to silently appear while you're stretching against a tree trunk or, God forbid, taking a leak on it. You just look up and there he is, smiling his little daydreamy smile but with a couple of tears running down his face and getting caught in his kitty-cat whiskers. Everything blooms out here, but he's not blaming allergies. The Boss has made some veiled comments about the delightful novelty of someone who can sneak up on her, so Adam knows he's not his father's only target, but he also knows better than to press Mom for specifics about how she likes to turn the tables after Dad does the ambushing.

Having Tristan around starts off like having a friend, which is the same thing that happened on the boat with the rest of Mom's unit full of weirdos and rejects, but it takes a quick turn and runs deep into some stranger territory. Maybe that's because Tristan is also not quite human, and his inhumanity is the exact same brand as Adam's. Maybe it's because he's nonverbal and has to do more with his face and hands. Maybe it's because he really has missed his son this much, despite having only known Adam when Adam was a tiny yowling poop machine. Whether or not it's related to his not having a speaking voice, Adam's father is kind of a sap, but Mom doesn't have a problem tolerating Tristan getting his feelings all over the place, so this probably isn't a new development.

Dad has an observable continuum of physical affection, with Mom, Adam and the Fury on one end--in about that order--and Jack all the way at the other end. It's no fault of Jack's how Tristan gives a nod over to Adam every time he reaches his paw out, just to barely tap it on Jack's forearm. Dad doesn't like to meow to get attention, and he can't talk without someone looking right at him. Even if Dad didn't end up going feral in an impressive way, the years in the jungle have given him time to make peace with the ocelot within. It's nice to share a silent acknowledgement of their irrational primal instinct, even when there's no objective evidence that Dad would ever want to chew off a piece of Jack like Adam does.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

At first Adam assumes that when Dad goes away a little bit, rattling around in his own cat-man head while he's staring hauntedly into the distance kind of like Bette Davis in _Dark Victory,_ it's got to be the same way that Adam used to switch his mind over to the imaginary parallel life where he was a cowboy and where nobody was sticking him with any hypodermic needles. Like father, like son, both nature and nurture, although Adam's a lot better at keeping all of his mental plates spinning and not giving away his daydreams to any scientists who might be watching from outside. 

Dad will even flat-out admit he's been drifting, when you tap him or call his name or give a little sub-vocal _prt_. Adam knows plenty about how real cats are supposed to work, and what that means as far as the full-humans letting you get away with antisocial behavior. Dad's been away from the lab and from any kind of direct observation for years, so that could excuse the old man's poor tradecraft. 

Back when Dad was behind bars, getting squinted at and clipboarded and fat-fold calipered, there were a lot more shackles and probes in the mix than there were during Adam's tenure. No wonder Dad had that slightly unsettled look, when he was translating for the dozen ghosts that were apparently tugging on his tail and trying to pass on their hard-won gay sex lore to Adam from the other side of existence. Adam understands perfectly why Tristan would have developed different associations with butt stuff, and it has nothing to do with prudery or inborn differences of taste.

There might not even be much difference in their taste, when you get down to it; Dad ended up hitched to a big sturdy bruiser, too. Mom seems as omnivorous as Jack, with the same penchant for wearing a bandana as a headband, a stronger will to power, and only slightly less enthusiasm for bush meat. Adam wouldn't put it past her to be working through Dad's hangups, one traumatizing loss of body autonomy at a time, which is another good reason for Adam to prowl far from camp when certain people are heading to bed. With Jack, Adam has his work cut out on the bandana front alone.

...That other thing, with Dad's ghosts, though. Something as bizarre as day-in, day-out haunting wasn't a surprise to Adam, not after listening to the Boss reminisce about his father, back when they both thought Dad was dead. The voices of unquiet spirits aren't the usual thoughts you get when you offer a penny, but he already knew that Mom didn't mind some weirdness in her companions. Adam's already learned more about bees, hornets and wasps than he ever wanted to, just from sticking around after he bums a cigarette from the Pain.

Dad didn't seem to be running a grift, no more than the Fury is. Ghosts are a normal amount of crazy to have gone, when you're a lab victim to start off with and then a jungle hermit for a couple of decades. The difference was that Mom actually believed in what her Tristan saw, in a way she quietly doesn't believe in the Fury's ghosts as things that exist outside of the Fury's mind. Adam could respect that as far as a benchmark of a good relationship; he'd seen _Harvey,_ on one of the lab's Movie Nights, and could easily place his father in the Jimmy Stewart role as a calm, mild-mannered eccentric. 

That was before the first time Adam had walked in on his father conversing silently with a ghost, visible to Adam, too, in a corner-of-his-eye sort of way. Not a trick of the light--that couldn't happen so _often_ \--and not an unaccounted-for visitor or the Fear in a costume or anything. He saw the sadness in his father's eyes, too, but no leads on whether it was left over from listening to the dead guy's unfinished business or from the prospect of burdening his son with further sorrows of his cursed bloodline. 

That was what Dad had said a while ago, anyway, when he was apologizing for how he'd handed down to Adam the deadly claws and night vision and lightning reflexes, which Adam had gracefully taken in the spirit it was meant and let himself get hugged and cried on about. As far as their ocelot heritage being a burden, Adam has no complaints as long as he doesn't get stuck in a cage again. He's hoping that Dad's kitty-cat whiskers are a Gen One thing, not something he has to look forward to in his old age, but everything else has been pretty good so far.

As another point against the Mysteries of the Other World being a really long con, Dad's ghost conversations don't stop when there's nobody there to catch him in it. As the family and the Cobras--so like he said, the family--get better accustomed to each other, Dad gets up to speed on everyone's history suspiciously quickly, even with allowances made for a lifetime's practice in being a good listener. Adam watches, since Dad isn't the only one who knows how to play dumb for his own advantage, and he'd place good money on the Cobras' collective kill count hovering around in the netherworld, a regiment of bored, dead soldiers ready to spill all kinds of gossip, now that there's someone to listen.

Of course, Adam wouldn't actually bet on it. One of Mom's lighter stories, from the voyage over, was how back in the day, Dad handily fleeced all of the low-level laboratory henchmen at the poker table. He just smiled his innocent little smile and passing the bounty of cigarettes and ration chits to his personal zookeeper. Dad swears the guy was a saint with a time card, but Adam knows Tristan well enough by now to be skeptical.

Given Dad's forgiving nature, he figures that Dad's primary lab tech just sneaked the fire-hose baths up from "freezing" to "tepid" and remembered more often than not to kill the fluorescent lights at night. It's infuriating, that Dad had to work his tail off for even the sort-of-humane treatment Adam got, even when he was being a little shithead and biting people. Adam's already promised himself he'd seek vengeance for his own mistreatment, so it doesn't mean as much as it ought to when he promises his father, too. Tristan still thanks him, with a tear in his eye, and then both of them get outclassed when the Fury adds his own promise of fiery retribution.


	5. Teh Itteh Bitteh Kitteh Committeh

Despite their having met so recently, Tristan might know the Fury better than anyone else does. Dad isn't suffering their time together in silence, either; they get along like a house on fire.

The Fury isn't half as fucked-up as you'd think--strike that, he's every bit what you'd expect, having made it through all his shit, and then Mom, and survived, but he gets along pretty well. You have to adjust your criteria. The Fury wouldn't make it in a city selling insurance, looking like Lon Chaney Jr. trying out new monster makeup, but neither would the rest of the unit, including Jack if you wrestled him into a sport coat. There's muttering and yeah, occasional roaring from the Fury, usually in the night, but Adam doesn't get the sense that his new comrade is trying to decide if the Cobra Unit's honor deserves a surprise viking funeral, before _the World can tarnish your nature._

...Weird conversationalist, too, but that's another flexible yardstick, when you've got a human database of bee (and apparently, cat) puns, plus a guy who knows tons of military history because he was _there,_ and of course Dad, who's listening to the ghosts who were also _there,_ and the Fear, who just wishes someone would ask him questions about applied bio-pharmacology or at least how he did up his eyes to look extra hollow and creepy.

Adam isn't supposed to know, but some of Dad and the Fury's hunting trips have been literal trips, beatnik-style. Dad knows the local flora and has tribal ghosts whispering to him their recipes for psychoactive vine soup, and it turns out the aftermath of leaving the planet with a fucked-up cosmonaut isn't the combustion you'd assume, but a paradoxical lessening of the painful fuckery. The Fury deserves some Dad-time if he wants it, Adam figures, although he'd leap at an offer to tag along. The Fury really could be more of an asshole, given everything. It's nice that he doesn't condescend to a mute ocelot-man (even though he has taken to petting Dad's head) and that Dad doesn't try to lord anything over the Fury, even though Dad sees real ghosts and the Fury just has crazy-person ghosts flying around in his head.

The Fury has also offered, out of the goodness of his blackened heart, to teach them both to drive. The Fury obviously regards this as a necessary life skill, same as he had Adam and Jack taking apart the boat engine--same as how he showed Adam and tried to show the Pain how to cook good rice without it over-boiling. Adam has gotten enough American teenagerism via Hollywood to be excited about taking part in a rite of passage, as well as the chance to go _fast_. 

Point of order: driving lessons were offered to Dad, first, while Dad and the Fury were getting a capybara ready for the spit. It's hard _not_ to eavesdrop on a mute guy, as long as you have line of sight. As far as the Fury and his normal human speech, at least as far as audio volume, Adam doesn't have his big golden ears just to look cute. 

Dad and the Fury were sitting on a log, finessing the hide off of the capybara's paws with the least amount of meat wasted around the toes, when the Fury put his arm around Dad kind of like a soldier in a movie holding his best girl. Adam would have wondered if he should tip off his mother about that sort of thing going on, except that the Fury also holds Dad kind of like a soldier in a movie holding his dying buddy, and also Adam doesn't remember the Fury holding anyone at all, not before Dad joined the unit.

Dad looked surprised, and worried, about the prospect of being the one to drive a troop transport, but his worry was holding at about Dad-normal levels. The Fury took that as a request to be persuaded, and night vision with twitchy wildcat reflexes make a good argument. They design most land vehicles so a human driver could wear mittens, the Fury noted, although he was saddened that the same was not true about aircraft and he could only share with his dear friend the gift of the air if he, the Fury, were at the yoke. 

That's when Dad pointed at Adam, who was, for the record, being perfectly subtle about eavesdropping. Dad just smiled, then made the startling suggestion that the Fury teach his son to drive as well--and after that, maybe to fly? The Fury nodded, mulling it over in his scalded lump of a head, while Dad signed a rapid-fire recounting of Adam's aerial maneuvers, night jumps to catch iguanas and navigating branch-to-branch.

 _"Yes._ I have seen him attack from above. It is good. Your son _will_ be pilot."

When the Fury says things like that, you can easily forget he's a crazy person and just admire his dedication. He has some strong opinions on things, when he's not pleading no comment because he's preoccupied with the overwhelming inevitability of death (which he wants to remind you that he welcomes). Of course he was one of the first to sign on for the revenge-slash-rescue mission against the animal-man project, in his little buddy's and his little buddy's son's name.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

Adam had learned long ago how to block things out of his memory; it's an important survival technique when your body isn't your own, but it still isn't a perfect solution, especially when it isn't something as straightforward as going entirely away from yourself for the duration of a _procedure_. Case in point, when Adam helps his father move most of his hoarded human artifacts out of the little cave he'd been using as a bolthole against the weather.

The whole thing is depressing as shit; Dad's so happy to show Adam the rough, industrial blankets he'd been sent with. They're still in reasonable condition if you take a lot of things into account, and yeah, they're familiar enough that Adam can guess their laboratory is either using the same supplier or still pulling from the same cache of surplus. Dad's got more ancient camping gear, given to him by his sainted lab tech, and then a few things he stole--things he _found,_ sorry, Dad--including some missionary outfit's portrait of a big blonde Mary. 

Adam really hopes Dad was using that religious literature as stroke material, because the alternative, looking at the faded print of a big-eyed blond Baby Jesus in her arms, is just fucking tragic. Even now, every time Adam thinks about throwing the _where were_ you _all my life_ line at his parents, he remembers Dad tacking up that fucking not-even-him baby picture and almost cries, except that he doesn't because you only need one of those per family and Dad's got it handled.

Back in the cave, Dad throws him the goony Dad-eyes about it, probably about to get all _Penny Serenade_ about the return of his beloved son, _again._ Adam just carefully folds Mary along her crease, puts her in the ammo crate Mom sent along for a footlocker, and tries his best to think about cowboys. He packs up the box and manages to keep one foot firmly in the Old West until he stumbles across the poetry. 

In Adam's defense, Dad's atrocious penmanship doesn't make things easy to skim. These are big pieces of bark with clawed-in letters, and it takes a moment of squinting before the top page turns out not to be a lizard jerky recipe or a castaway science project's diary.

  
"yr Holy Cunt wense sweetund Life duth flo  
2 bring cruul bloom 2 parched forrgotin land"  


Which is no less than Adam deserves for digging through the private papers in someone's study without asking, even if they were only a pile of flattened bark in a cliffside cave. Dad gets back from the other end of the cave, arms full of animal pelts that the ghost of Kit Carson probably told him how to preserve, and doesn't even have the guile to look embarrassed.

 _No,_ Adam answers his father's hopeful sign language very quickly, his perfect human hands aren't perfect at writing yet. Did Dad ask the Fury? Oh, the Fury's better at Cyrillic, and this is all written in English because English is the language of your lady's heart. Well, yeah, that does make a certain sense, Dad; I get it.

Being that the lady in question is _Mom,_ Adam doesn't think she'd be that picky about spelling mistakes in these actual volumes of gross love poetry Dad's been saving up all these years, but pointing out that fact would mean Adam has to continue having this conversation, so he keeps it to himself. Dad never minds a companionable silence, and this one has gotten more cozy than melancholy.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

Dad's at his most human and his most inhuman, showing Adam all around his territory; he's thrown it open to the whole Cobra Unit, and welcome to it, but he's even more happy-sad-happy that Adam is here, who can truly appreciate what _territory_ means to beasts like him.

The briefing that the rest of the Cobra Unit got about fishing spots and river trout was probably a lot more succinct; Tristan and Adam spend days just sitting next to each other, watching the fish in the river swim into the underwater trap that Dad's built out of rocks and woven branches. Adam takes his clever human fingers and rigs a fishing rod for each of them to meditate on, with effusive thanks from Tristan. Adam's seen the survival kit his father was sent with, and the snarl of hooks and fishing line that was tucked back into its pouch with palpable remorse. Dad has absolutely nothing to be ashamed about, if you ask Adam. Adam's first meal out of captivity was scooped onto a metal dish, just about the same as when he was in; the only difference was that his mom was eating it too, and also that it wasn't as fresh as the laboratory fare. On the other hand, here's Dad with no actual cat experience up to the point that he was airmailed into the middle of nowhere, a Robinson Crusoe with mittens on his hands. Adam ought to track down the author of Tristan's dog-eared survival book and let him know just how long a smart guy can stay alive, just from those line drawings of log snares and fish traps.

The chattering birds come back now and then, when the cat-men have been still long enough. Watching his father suddenly leap after them, up out of the shallows like a spring, reminds Adam of pestering the End to teach him about sniping and all the moments when he figured out that the old man wasn't really sleeping. There's something more, and deeper, that he's sharing with his father in their silence--no, not silence, just not a conversation with words.

"In the movies," Adam finally says out loud, "fathers take their sons out fishing, but that's really where they have their talks about, well. Life."

 _Sorry_ is what Tristan signs with one big paw, since they're doing human language now. The look on his father's face and the wobble to his whiskers tells Adam that he is in no way being sarcastic.

"I meant--that's what we're _doing,_ right now. Shit, that's just the movies, anyway. Sometimes they go fishing just so you'll care when a gang of bandits shoot the father two scenes later and then the boy swears his revenge."

Human speech is probably overrated. Adam doesn't have to go as far as explaining that he really is ready to pack up and fight desperados for his family before Tristan is hugging him, holding his son's head to his furry chest where the purring is loudest. That sets Adam's own motor going, and there's nobody else out here to see Adam resting in his father's arms, allowing the golden, spotted ears that stick up from the top of his head to be groomed like he was a kitten-boy half his age.

"You, me, _and_ Mom; we all get to fight together, now." 

It never takes much to set off Dad's waterworks, but Adam's surprised when thinking about that makes his own eyes sting a little.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Adam, you have the rest of your life for screwing. Appreciate your parents a little while we're here."
> 
> "Hey, I can do both. Wanna see?"
> 
> "You don't have to prove anything to me." The Boss doesn't doubt her son's ability to multitask; on a strictly technical level, his ambidextrous gun-spinning _is_ impressive. 
> 
> "Anyway, Dad says dead people can fuck, too."
> 
>  _"Really._ I suppose I should ask him for a detailed briefing on that."
> 
> The Boss has never doubted Adam was her son, and the half-disgusted, half-interested look on his pointy little face lets her know that he's very aware she's his mother.


	6. A Cat Is Fine, Too

Jack knows he's young, and he's not even comparing himself to the End when he says that. He's still had a longer career in the service than he ever did in school, even if now he's technically quit both of them by the efficient technique of just not showing up for roll call any more. Anyway, he's heard a lot of locker room bragging about having a wildcat in the sack, but never saw anyone with bite marks like the ones he's sporting now.

They're not killing bites, even the ones right over the jugular; exotic as he is, there's no way to forget that Adam's part hairless monkey, too, same as everyone else. You give that cat curiosity a set of human hands to work with, and the result is Adam suddenly ten feet up in the jungle canopy with his hands around your service pistol, purring the same way he does when he has his hands around you and those impossible claws start to prick out of his fingers.

With his blond hair growing out and mussed from their wrestling, Adam looks an awful lot like the Boss, but Jack's been blessed with an engine that doesn't stop for mild confusion or even a little bit of guilt. Besides, the Boss never smiles like that unless there's someone in front of her who's about to die and richly deserves to, and Jack's conscience isn't nagging at him more than usual. Adam's eyes crinkle when they squint, just like their mutual commanding officer's, but in the darkness they reflect too much light, showing the off-round pupils of a different kind of hunter.

The Boss doesn't have a book of baby pictures to embarrass her son with, although the people who kept her from all the joys of motherhood are dead or marked for death now, and her whole special ops unit is ready to help with that. What she does have is a smuggled-out copy of a copy of Adam's dossier, mostly the parts with his behavior reviews and performance specs, and less about the budget they had to turn a prisoner into an asset. Jack has gotten to read parts of it, with Adam supervising. 

Jack doesn't need an eyes-only file to find out he's in bed with a guy who has a "high prey drive," but it's nice to see that there's a name for it, in writing. Some military scientists had a lot of optimism about being able to point Adam at their own chosen targets, and Jack can confirm the starry eyes Adam gets when he catches the right flash of movement in the distance, the coiling spring in his wildcat spine as he drops immediately into the hunt. Sometimes the prey stays there in the distance until it drops untouched, ever since Adam appropriated his own firearms to kill like the rest of mankind. 

Sometimes that prey is Jack himself, so now Jack has a little more understanding for a deer's hypnosis when a hunter has it in his sights. It wouldn't be any more terrifying if Adam had a gun on him; Jack's been under the Boss long enough to be used to fighting for his life. The same split-second decision-making that had Jack join up with her for the mission to reunite her family is what comes into play when he's bowled over by claws and teeth and crazy eyes blown wide. 

Jack's a pragmatist, day to day, but he's never claimed to have a normal process of risk evaluation. So Adam takes a second to pick a bloody feather out of his fangs, licking his lips while he's pulling off Jack's fatigues; Jack's not going to argue with the process. His danger sense hasn't been working right since long before he joined up with the Boss. Even a momentary thought about his boyfriend's mother doesn't slow down what's happening amidst sharp teeth and a hot, slightly rough tongue, while Adam's claws just barely prick where he's grabbing onto Jack's hips, so he's not playing it too cool today either.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

Jack figures the journey back toward the network of secret animal-people labs, mostly by air and going in the other direction, ought to be easier than when the entire Cobra Unit took the long trip out here with a newly-freed Adam. This time nobody's going to be tailing the Boss, her husband, her son and her scarred-up cosmonaut.

Jack is going to be staying back at camp, so there won't be the faint background threat that Tristan might suddenly decide to sweep Jack off his feet and into a middle-aged ocelot-man love nest. That ought to mean that the two or three or hell, four of them, the Fury included, will have time for some family bonding stuff like you're supposed to. Adam and his dad are getting along all right, these days, and if anything about close quarters changes that, at least Jack's bunk won't be one of the things that's handy to get piss-marked as a preemptive strike. 

They do need that space; there have been a couple of hiccups along the way to an ocelot family peace. Adam's an expert at finding the best spot for a nap, and napping around here is barely even a cat thing. It gets fucking hot near the Equator, and there's no percentage in trying to accomplish anything in the worst hours of the midday sun. Adam seems to have an inborn sense of the equation that weighs comfort, climate and defensibility, and he makes those calculations with the same simple elegance as when he stretches out across a Y-shaped tree branch, no movement wasted.

It's probably instinct, Jack figures, because Adam's only been stationed here as long as he has. Tristan has been living in the jungle since rogue elements in his laboratory faked his death, but he's also the same part-wildcat as his son, so it's cute as shit but also inconclusive that he ends up in the same resting spots as Adam. Jack's patrolled past Adam conked out, and then come back later to see his father wrapped around him, or next to him under a shading vine, both their spines inhumanly flexible as they came to the same independent decision. Maybe Tristan stalks after his son and does it on purpose; Jack's the last person in the Cobra Unit to say about fathers and sons. 

Adam doesn't seem to mind it unless someone else is nearby to notice, and then he mostly minds it out loud; Jack's not the best judge of nuance, but he can see there's embarrassment in Adam, then read the loving tolerance all over Tristan. Other than how his paw-hands muddle up sign language, Tristan's a pretty easy guy to read. Maybe not being able to speak naturally gives you a more expressive face, or Tristan's trying to really project how much he absolutely doesn't mind that Jack's being queer with his son, or maybe it's just Jack's wilderness survival skills picking up on the ears and the tail. Those animal quirks are handy; they make an unguarded cat-person much less of a mystery than your general-issue human, if you ask Jack.

Soon enough, Adam starts taking his revenge by doing the same thing back to Tristan, cuddling into his sleeping father's furred limbs in the crush of small spaces, too small by human standards but perfectly cozy for an ocelot-man. Two ocelot-men. Adam's crew cut is growing out even paler blond than his mother's hair, now that nobody's holding him down with a control pole while another lab tech buzzes it short. Tristan's receding grey hair is long, but not wildman-long any more. The length the Boss has unilaterally decided for her husband lands about where a collar would be, if he didn't mostly wear his poncho-thing. Their sharp-lined faces echo each other just like Jack would expect with relatives, but even asleep, Adam's resting face is that of an angel who's decidedly fallen, while Tristan looks like a worn-out librarian, even with his prized glasses tucked away.

Maybe the slow-motion takeover of catnap spots isn't revenge after all; Jack gets a hard-to describe feeling, catching them like that. It's something warm, and something a little like jealousy, but maybe more like a hunger, and an easy one to fix. He finds Tristan and Adam on a patch of ground, soft enough to be comfortable but not so soft that it's wet and has the worms interested. There are a few branches partially over them; excellent cover, and the leaves on this bush aren't hard enough to be pokey. Ocelots have good ideas and Jack's off-duty, so he sacks out next to Adam, on the opposite side as his father, and figures that someone out of the three of them will probably notice when the sun lets up and it's worth it to be awake.

Jack was right: he wakes up because he's cooled off, both from the approaching dusk and from the loss of the warm body closest to him.

_"Dad,"_ Adam hisses, and that's barely a figure of speech. "I don't cuddle up when it's you and Mom, OK, so I'd appreciate the same _courtesy_ when it's me and Jack. We need space sometimes, OK?"

Jack knows he's missing out on some signing, given the other guy in this conversation, but it seems like the smart move to stay out of it. It sounds like Adam would _like_ to lie down next to his dad and the Boss, now and then. Jack's reminded again how young Adam is, but as he thinks about it, he's never minded bunking next to the Boss either. It might be nice being in the middle of that, as long as they didn't start any couples' stuff across him, which is probably Adam's concern here, too.

The lull is a little too long, though, so either Tristan is floundering, or Adam's calculating just how pissed off to be at an innocent cat-man. Tristan has been nothing but kind to Jack, and given him some great tips on hunting the local wildlife, so Jack figures that his honor as a warrior or something else stupid means he pretty much has to speak up.

"Hhnnn," he says, still reconciling himself to being awake. "I turned in last. You two were both sleeping already. Looked like a good spot... room for three."

"Shit. Sorry, Dad. God dammit, Jack," Adam sums up, but there's a twinkle in his eyes that matches the smile he's trying to hide. Tristan still gets up to take his leave, but with a pat to Jack's arm and a hug for Adam, and his own little knowing smile that makes the ends of his whiskers wobble. They're going to need a little time alone to work off this energy, Jack can tell from the twitch of Adam's spotted tail. It'd be much more awkward if Tristan weren't such a gentleman about everything.


	7. PURRRVOCATIVE POSING

Tristan doesn't seem to mind cat jokes, in the same comfortable way that the Pain offers bee jokes, the Fear absolutely loves innuendo about his tongue, and the End will jump in ahead of you and claim to be old enough to have learned sniping with a muzzle-loader. Jack can tell the Boss feels weird about it, though; she hasn't said anything, but after years as her student, Jack feels when the Boss is getting on edge, the same way a prey animal will freeze at the right kind of twig snapping. It's probably the same kind of thing Tristan notices all the time, as attuned as he is to minute changes in the world around him, but when Jack gets on that train of thinking, it lets him off next door to cat jokes again.

For a change of pace, the Pain tried out some "henpecked husband" material, _once_. Tristan didn't get upset, but it was the first time Jack saw him really get serious. Across the clearing, _the Boss_ smiled, like she was borrowing the family's only smile from Tristan. Adam hung around to help his father make his point with sign language translations, and only a little bit because the Boss' son has an eye for conflict, and a line about being "pussy-whipped" that Jack appreciates why Adam has been saving for the perfect moment. 

Back in captivity, Adam had made sure that the scientists thought he was as mute as his father had been, so now he has years of experience in remedial paw-sign class to draw on when Tristan gets eloquent and needs help. Tristan's hands are big and furry and not very dexterous; they can be tough for Jack to read, but mostly when things get abstract, and at least he's not part Canada lynx or something. Adam says that when he was in the laboratory, he sat next to a platypus-boy who made up for having webbed flipper-hands by having venom in their claws. That was good practice for reading not-human-enough hands now, as well as a decent motivator for Adam to help his classmate out with his homework.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

Tristan is a smart guy, just with his paw-hand situation slowing down the expression of it. If Jack had been on his own just as long, he doesn't think he'd have gotten so philosophical, the whole talking-to-ghosts thing notwithstanding. Alone in the jungle, Jack would have been calling it a day after building pit traps and stinking. He finds it easy to turn things off, sometimes, falling into a thing that the Fear tried his best to explain to him as "no-mind," a kind of Oriental philosophy with the serial numbers filed off. Maybe if things had been different and Jack had had time with his Japanese grandmother, he'd know one single goddamn thing about Zen, but calling it a nature vs. nurture thing seems like an awful stretch, even when your boyfriend and his dad both like to scratch their ocelot claws on the same kinds of tree bark.

Jack read somewhere that pet cats make most of their meows for the benefit of nearby humans, with feral cats staying enviably quiet until it's time to fight or fuck. Getting used to close contact with the Cobra Unit doesn't make Tristan stop walking silently when he isn't even meaning to. On his padded paw-feet it's too easy to sneak up on commandos who are innocently trying to brew the morning coffee, but as the weeks pass Jack notices more vocal noises coming from their newest recruit. 

Tristan has always smiled when he waved or nodded a good morning, but now there's a little "myeh" to go with it, a question mark kind of sound as he signs or points something for consideration, a hum as he taps your arm, and a clicking chitter that can turn all the way into a chirp depending on how excited he is or how close the bird is getting. Jack isn't going to be the one to say out loud that the Boss' man speaking his mind sounds more like a friendly tabby than a king of the jungle, red in tooth and claw. Having Tristan around still feels kind of like having a stray cat settled in behind the barracks and kind of like they press-ganged a hermit into their unit. He'd make a good monk, with his meditative bearing, harmony with nature, and nine-tenths of a vow of silence; the robes would probably be good for hiding his tail. On the other hand, he and the Boss are cheerfully far from chastity, although Jack has also seen Tristan gazing at her like she's something holy.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

Pretty soon after the Boss knocked some sense into Jack and taught him how to make romantic ocelot yowls, and after Adam went on to knock him fully on his ass for a mutually-appreciated midnight jungle handjob, the Pain takes Jack aside, alone, and does his avuncular best to be straightforward with the man's man's version of the birds and especially the bees. 

A few days later, the Fear singles Jack out and covers the same ground, either unaware he's been beaten in his public-spirited errand, or just wanting to make sure the junior Cobras had the kind of level-headed sex advice you get from a guy who's split his own tongue up the middle for the sheer hell of it, to counterbalance the sex advice you get from a six-foot-seven drama queen who gestates hornets in his own flesh.

With all that information to process, Jack immediately goes to compare his notes with Adam, who, unsurprisingly, has also been taken aside twice for The Talk, plus a conversation with his dad that he doesn't want to share. The overlap between their briefings has Adam personally convinced that the Fear and the Pain are more than help-your-buddy-out queer, and probably for each other if they got their acts together.

Jack knows he doesn't have the background to speculate. Since Adam was the one who figured out their own algebra, and that's been working pretty well so far, he gives Adam's assessment the weight it deserves. Jack does know he'd sit the Pain and the Fear next to each other if the fate of the world hung on Jack planning a dinner party, but that's on the strength of them getting along fine and each being into his own separate bug thing. Is that how matchmaking starts?

Jack knows his strengths; he'll let the Pain and the Fear handle it on their own. The Boss will probably step in if it gets too bad for unit cohesion, same as she did for her sons. Adam says that if one or both of their comrades gets his head out of his ass, the Fear and the Pain should have the spiders and the bees worked out by the time the rest of the Cobra Unit gets back to base. He suggests Jack would do best just to keep out of the way, which is exactly the second vote Jack's looking for to maintain his noninterventionalist policy.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

Of course, Jack's luck doesn't hold forever, at least as far as getting a heart-to-heart from Adam's dad. Jack figures that Tristan's probably already mustered his Wisdom of the Ancient Spirits all about joint homosexual operations, and passed it on--or tried to--to his beloved son, so now he's getting out of it easy with an abridged congratulations. 

Jack can follow Tristan's hand-signs for daily things and going on the hunt, but he still gets lost when the conversation gets esoteric. At least the guy understands that; Tristan even signs to Jack that he appreciates being reminded before he gets in too deep. Sometimes they try things again or they amicably agree to give up if it's not important, although Jack is suspicious about the amount of things Tristan started to say but then decided weren't really important. Other times Tristan sees if he can write it out better, his tail lashing slowly side to side as he holds the grease pencil in his paw, the same way Adam's tail moves when he's stalking prey, or getting ready to jump on Jack. When a concept is really complicated, he leaps off to find Adam or the Boss to translate. Sometimes Tristan comes back with the Fury, who is also getting much better at reading paw-language and has the contextual benefit of knowing what Tristan was pondering thirty minutes ago, when the two of them were scaling fish for lunch together.

Jack's pretty glad the Fury isn't along now. Tristan's face is a little pinked up as he explains, very sparingly, that he thinks Jack and Adam can make use of this jar of drippings. It's mostly peccary lard, strained and rendered into pure, creamy bone-white, and Jack becomes slowly certain that Tristan doesn't mean he and Adam need to go off and secretly cook for themselves, even though that sounds pretty fun too.

It's easier to understand that Tristan wants Jack to keep the source of this bounty under his hat. Jack's had basic training and then the Boss beat him out of the civilian shame of body matters. He's more of a stealth operative than a spy, the kind of guy you send to creep along the wall and start cold-cocking people without introduction. Even so, Jack knows that some sources need to stay anonymous. Nobody wants to think about their dad when they're undertaking maneuvers, and the less anyone says out loud, the less likely the Boss is to get involved and cause a similar problem for Jack.

Jack isn't completely sure, after all of the careful discussion, if Tristan outright _stole_ this grease for them or if the Fury is another of their benefactors. As the new owner of a repurposed pickle jar full of smooth white lard, Jack's not sure if Tristan's strong but unwieldy paws could have managed to screw the lid on. Maybe the Fury just thinks he let his mostly-carnivorous best friend have a treat, or that he let him sneak it to share with his son. In the end, Jack decides to stay quiet about that too, and the Fury doesn't wink or smile or act any stranger to him than usual, in the days before they deploy.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

While the Boss takes her detachment to Eastern Europe for intel, a supply line, and maybe a few starter refugees, Jack will be holding down the fort with the other half of the Cobra Unit; the Fear, the Pain and the End. The Boss leaves them the stolen boat and a bit of homework, so they don't just end up kicking back and listening to the hornets drone in the equatorial sun. 

The Cobras' hidden camp is just fine for eight self-sufficient mercenaries who are all chronological adults, but when they end up with more animal-people on their hands, there's no telling how well they'll be able to cram everyone in. Some of them might not be cat-people, but made out of another kind of animal that doesn't like jungles any more than the average human. Some of the animal-people are probably going to be fucked up from relentless medical testing, or they could just be eight years old or something. It isn't like the Boss can crack open a cage and just leave whoever she finds there, like she's picking her team for football.

Back at the current camp, there's also the matter of the village nearby. The locals have already been gracious in accommodating a 200% increase in the cat-man population, thanks to their preexisting mythology having werecats in it and Tristan's years of being a respectful neighbor. Now the Boss is going out after trouble. Jack knows that the Boss usually gets what she's after, and also knows that bringing a fight back home to uninvolved civilians is a no-go. There's a map with other likely sites along the coast marked out, places with better defensibility, more resources or better river access, assuming the survey was correct.

That's assuming, and Boss has already explained to Jack what happens to his ass when he assumes, so he knows that due diligence means it's time for an extended scouting mission. It's still likely to be a low-risk one where the Cobra Unit are the only humans for miles. The Fear is quietly excited about finding more native insects and arachnids to milk in the off-hours; the Pain has nothing but good things to say about all the different fruits that are ripe on the trees here. Insects, too, but it's mostly "the ladies" eating those, although Jack agrees with the hornets' assessment of the plump local crickets.

Jack also enjoys the hunting down here, but as much as he'll eat a bug when he's hungry, he wouldn't reach past a nice, fat lizard to do so. It's nice that Adam gets to run an op with both of his parents, and the Fury will get to explain his philosophy to people in his native language. Jack isn't the kind of guy to send Adam any letters or, God forbid, write poetry about missing him, but he's already planning to keep tabs on any boar tracks he finds while Adam's gone. Good eating any time, but it'll be better to wait until he has his wildcat to share the hunt with.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [The title is from this,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaA_cs4WZHM) which cheers me up no matter how many times I've seen it.


	8. i Amn just........... a litle creacher. Thatse It . I Canot change this

So now, at long last, they move to strike back.

Tristan isn't sure how he feels about signing his new friends up for a revenge mission, duration unknown, and based, to an uncomfortable degree, on wrongs done to his own inconsequential self. His Joy is all for it, though, with every bit of the enthusiasm that won her her code name. She had thought that Tristan was dead for so long, and in the meantime she fought all on her own for little Adam without ever having gotten to hold his innocent little body in the first place. 

Sitting on a rock by the river, with his furry paw-feet dangling in the cool water, Tristan discusses his misgivings with the spirits. He's never thought that he's particularly wise or introspective, just a cat-man who started out as a kitten-boy who could talk to the dead all around him and who was patient enough to let all of them weigh in with their opinions. Tristan had learned from the spirits that what had been happening to him from birth was _wrong,_ but he's pretty sure that the other animal-people figured that one out all on their own, without any help from beyond the grave. The spirits had also confirmed that so much had happened to so many people that was wrong and that it was the way that the world worked and works. It was safer not to fight, they told him, especially when you are a child, alone and small.

Today, in his adulthood, one of the louder spirits is a woman who caught a machete during an uprising on a sugarcane plantation, backed up by the usual gang and a couple who won hard experience when the army moved in to back up a civilian guano exporter. These dead aren't the spirits to talk Tristan out of his negative opinion on the military-industrial complex, especially weapons development, but the dead seldom are.

"No, she obviously loves you and the kid," María explains, ghostly feet standing on the surface of the water next to him, "but you shouldn't think she's doing this only for _you._ This isn't a favor she's doing on your say-so. She's fighting her own fight against those bastards because they fucked around with _her_ man and _her_ son. Same with your burned-up astronaut brother. He loves you and it's an injustice what happened to you, but this is his own fight. He's just bringing it over to yours."

She makes a very good point, her pale hair flickering between being wrapped in a bandana, and floating bloody and free. Tristan appreciates how graciously he gets the help he needed to untangle guilt from egotism. Of course his Boss knows her own mind; a man towed in her wake might as well worry about influencing the rain to fall. The wisdom of the spirits is patience, and staring at the silver sparkle of fish in the river is more meditative than a crystal ball.

"Howdy, Dad. Talkin' to the ghosts?" Adam asks, his movements ocelot-silent as he alights next to Tristan on the sun-warmed boulder. There's a sideways flicker in his son's grey eyes that makes Tristan worry again, in a different way. As much as the presence of the dead has eased Tristan's lonely days, he has always hoped for a happy, normal life for his son, without the intrusion of even the friendly dead. 

As normal as is possible, with everything else taken into consideration. Adam has two parents who love him, but he also has ocelot ears, retractable claws and a boyfriend, all of which he'll need to be careful about demonstrating in public as long as the world remains in its current state. About the spirits, Tristan only has to nod to answer in the affirmative, since Adam has already caught him dead to rights. 

"Aw, shit; you're sitting out here crying? _Dad."_ Adam wraps himself around Tristan, tail and all. His son doesn't smell like old milk and baby shampoo any more; he smells even more like himself. It's still the singular scent of baby Adam but stronger and more nuanced. There's a trace of ignited gunpowder and a lighter odor of leather, the sweat of hard work and a little echo of Jack. Adam is his own self-made man, no matter that he's a cat-man. All of these aspects form a whole person, a free man at last, as if Tristan's wishes had had consequence in the universe. 

"You know you can come over and say something to me, next time. Everyone just assumes you're out here catching fish. Staring at nothing. A guy can get away with a lot, doin' the cat thing."

Tristan's breath hitches on Adam's shoulder, just the once but his son sighs as he's caught out. Among the burdens Adam's sire has laid on him, beyond the ocelot genome and the glimpses of spirits and a birth into captivity, is the shame of a weak and sentimental father. Adam bears Tristan's frailty with the same strength his mother does. His arms are gentle but firm as they sit beside the river, alone except for the fish and the dead as Adam talks his father back into the world of the living.

"So anyway, the Fear's making headway on some human costumes, but he's gotta borrow your tail for a fitting. Mom has a couple real lady dresses for backup--she _hates_ them, but they work awful well for concealment. Not like _she_ has a tail, but her guns. And knives; the usual. I think the Fury is dressing up like a regular civilian; he's fucked up, but it's, like, an explainable kind of fucked-up, at least the skin part. If they're staring at his face situation, they won't have time to notice anything weird about the rest of us. The Fear says that's worked out pretty well before, for group disguises. The Fury doesn't mind doin' the heavy lifting."

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

With Adam's hair growing out, for the first time in his life as a free cat-man, the Fear constructs a clever arrangement with a hair tie and some hidden clips. It turns Adam from a wild curiosity to an ordinary man, as long as you aren't worried he might be a youth from the counterculture, and as long as you don't look too hard at the sides of his head where a set of human ears ought to be. Tristan's more mature hairline means he isn't a good candidate for the Fear's ocelot-ear comb-over, but Adam assures him he's missing nothing; it "stings like something the Pain would be into." Adam thanks the Fear (who's been uncharacteristically quiet since Adam speculated about the Pain) and decides he'd rather wear a hat to hide his wildcat heritage, even if it has to be a tied-tight bandana, or a beat-up and passé budenovka.

"It's gotta be something boring, anyway, since Mom already found out I was planning to bring the Stetson. You tell her?" Adam shrugs, cheerfully enough. The Boss' wicked smile shows sharper teeth when it's on Adam's face. "I don't blame you, Dad; suppose a man has to know where his loyalties lie."

Adam is _not_ a lone gunslinger from a movie about cowboys, but he delivers the last sentence like he's squinting against the dust and the desert sun. Tristan shrugs back and smiles a little sheepishly, similarly theatrical because he's been caught dead-to-rights by his son, who just laughs. 

"Anyway, it's Mom; she's probably right, I guess, even if I don't agree with her taste. Now, are you really sure you're OK with cutting your whiskers? She said we could work something around them, if they're important."

Their costumer returns; the Fear is back among them, bringing the sharper parts of his grooming kit as Adam pokes at Tristan's authentic kitty-cat whiskers experimentally, smoothing them with and then against the grain with his perfect human hands. Tristan is reasonably certain he won't run into any trees with them trimmed close--he never did in the years before he grew them--but it's sweet of his son to be so considerate. "Mom'll have my hide if you get your head stuck in a banister or something."

 _They're just for looks. I think._ Tristan signs. _Feeling vibration, a little. I would scream if you plucked them out. Scissors are fine._ His Boss is almost solicitous, for her, but Tristan knows his eyes, his fangs, and whatever they end up putting over his ears will look strange enough, in the wider world; better not to borrow a bandana to cover something that he can just grow back.

"That reminds, me, Tristan: if it isn't too personal," the Fear says, looking at Adam, "When _did_ those whiskers start growing? I'm sure certain people would be very interested."

With Adam holding the little scissors in close to his face, Tristan knows better than to start grinning before he taps his son's arm to get some space to talk. Everyone on the Cobra Unit is getting conversant with Tristan's signs, but concrete concepts are still the easiest.

 _The cat-whiskers grew around the same time my hairline started receding_ comes across very nicely. It's an excellent punchline, especially since it's completely true. Under his own widow's peak, the Fear looks quietly pleased to have set up his agemate with a straight line, and Adam looks like he can't decide whether he's going to commit to being embarrassed or just be happy that his dad is making friends with the other old farts.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

All of the Cobra Unit gathers around the main camp in the evening. It's nothing official; no bell rings, nobody's playing "Taps." The Boss doesn't need to make edicts about daily life like that, and she'd be disappointed if anyone under her command needed micromanaging. They're all adults, more or less. Whether someone wants to go out and hunt for extra frogs or get introspective in a clearing or just stealth camo himself behind a boulder so he can jerk off with only God to watch him, having their own liberty is also good for their unit cohesion.

For the rest of the time, humans are social animals, especially with the freedom not to be, and Tristan, an almost-human, is no exception. He never knew how much he missed that in his years conversing with the dead and spying on his village neighbors from the safety of the jungle foliage. In his younger days as a _sub_ -human research subject, Tristan still had people talking to him and telling him to put the tray in the slot and the pegs in the holes, and sometimes putting a warm human arm around his shoulders. Being held steady for an injection is a poor cousin of just being held, but Tristan has had more of the first to look back on than he ever had his blessed time in his Boss' embrace.

So Tristan doesn't need any coercion to join his new friends around the fire. His ocelot instincts, same as his son's, tell him that the dawn and the dusk are excellent times to prowl and make sure that his territory is still _his,_ but there's an ape-descendant longing too, and it's hard to ignore, now that there are _other humans_ around who are allowed to see him, to talk to him, to pat him on the back or on the arm, and maybe even scratch his ear.

Tristan doesn't have to ignore either set of instincts. There's plenty of crepuscular time left over to creep around, after the Cobra Unit mostly goes to bed, and his beloved son is here now and has a young man's eagerness to scent-mark at least half of his territory. Their territory.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

On one of their earlier evenings as a family and a unit, after the first supply run, Adam reclined by the fire, demonstrating both his reading skills and his wildcat ability to see in low light. Showing off, maybe, but Tristan was enthralled and, as he so often is, very proud of his clever son.

Buying an English copy of [_The Island of Dr. Moreau_](https://www.bartleby.com/1001/) could have been a giveaway on the fugitives' shopping trip, if anyone on the Kemonomimi Project's payroll got to checking the receipts of used bookstores in port cities, or at least the ones that had been visited by gringos who never took off their hats. There's debilitating paranoia and then there's reasonable caution; the Fear is a good resource on the difference between the two, and how to execute the latter. While Adam and Jack had piled an apple crate full of pulp novels, heavy on the westerns, for their supposed ship full of bored sailors, the Fear had thrown in Spanish _Popular Mechanics_ collections, a few cookbooks, some guides to decorative tole painting and another book in Japanese that showed how to fold paper into little animal shapes, if you have the nimble human hands that everyone in camp except Tristan has. All of that to help hide the reference books on big cats, and another few about hymenoptera (with nice hornet pictures) that could give the Cobra Unit's presence away. The romance novels--well, those hypothetical sailors wouldn't mind a few of those to pass around, either.

The Fear is a man of many subtle talents, which he hides as best he can by skittering backwards up trees and shooting people with his crossbow. Tristan has the idle dead to whisper truths to him, but doesn't need more clues than the years he spent hiding his own light as a harmless, silly little cat-man who only wanted to help his important scientist friends. Such similar _modi operandi_ means that Tristan and the Fear, men of awareness and caution (and expedient tree-climbing), began their friendship with a long, mutual observation.

That night, the Fear was maintaining his crossbow by lamplight, while Adam read to his father (and incidental Cobras) about a normal man who finds himself surrounded by bestial humans--or human-like beasts.

> I waded ashore, and picked up and examined the revolvers. To satisfy myself against the subtlest trickery, I discharged one at a round lump of lava, and had the satisfaction of seeing the stone pulverised and the beach splashed with lead. Still I hesitated for a moment.  
>  “I’ll take the risk,” said I, at last; and with a revolver in each hand I walked up the beach towards them.

Tristan's Boss had read out loud to him as well, in the in-between times in their marital bed. Adam's extensive paperwork from his captivity was not something to be shared without discretion. The scientists, reporting to their military superiors, had said he was a very promising young ocelot-man for field assignments, especially in the field of firearms, but not entirely trustworthy in his enthusiasm, especially in the field of firearms.

Everyone on the Boss' team has his share of quirks, so when Adam's story time took an extended narrative turn away from the philosophical nature of Man and towards how cool guns are, Tristan signed, with a grin, that he would like to check that book. Adam grinned right back and surrendered the paperback to his father, who held it carefully with his unwieldy paws, moving it back and forth and a little sideways in the lamplight until he could see that this page did have a lot of the word _"revolver."_

"So where were we? Before I was interrupted," Adam asked rhetorically, starting up where he left off with Dr. Moreau's animal-men. Across the clearing the Fear was silent, but paused in his fletching of the spider-venom crossbow bolts.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

"I know you can read, but anyone can see it's not easy. Hey, don't even start with that _'just a dumb cat'_ routine; I don't think that's your problem." In the daylight, alone with Tristan, the Fear had a section of newspaper already flattened out on the table. There was a memory of wrinkles where it had been folded around some breakable provision; in hiding, the Cobra Unit didn't keep up any subscriptions. "Just humor me; what's the smallest line you can read, here? Free hint; this one's in English."

The letters did their usual swim in and out, until Tristan was able to point out something about a coup against the sultanate of Zanzibar; he couldn't read it aloud, of course, but the Fear seemed to accept his honesty. The headline was barely above the fold but it was still a headline, and that apparently meant that Tristan needed the _"shit, no wonder"_ strength of reading glasses, which the Fear promised to procure for him on the next supply trip.

Tristan thanked the Fear, who tried his usual best to bat it away; who would ever have cause for gratitude to the Fear, the terrifying Spider Soldier of the legendary Cobra Unit? The lizard-tongued man who can disappear into thin air and cause paralysis with darts from nowhere--the man who had already found Tristan a wooden comb with a handle big enough for his knurled paws to wrap around, and who always makes sure the End has an afternoon meal set out for him and his parrot, if he's too busy napping to be punctual.

Even without Tristan's second sight, and despite his newly-diagnosed farsightedness, he could see another lost soul whose struggles to belong were finally realized when he joined the rest of the misfits under his Boss' command. He reached out to the Fear again and patted his comrade's arm, then signed that he would bring the Fear much better spiders once he could see their little faces right.

"Yeah? I'll hold you to that," the Fear said, with enough of a smile to reveal his own teeth, the plain human ones that he had had to file to points all by himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Boss said "get in, losers; we're quitting the Illuminati and putting my family back together."
> 
> It took a little longer to realize that they'd been a family even before they ocelot-napped her kid.


	9. i Have Lotse of thotes in my litle brain

Tristan was never picked for firearms training, back in the lab that engineered him, and raised him, and also held him captive. It would have been a waste of time and effort to humor his mute, pacifist mitten-paws, not like the expedience of training the naturally-violent subjects and the ones with real human-style fingers. Now, as two free ocelot-men, Adam gets to sit down and show his long-lost father everything he's learned as well as everything he's taught himself. Half of Adam is made out of the Boss, after all, so the ocelot tail can't drag down his portion of her easy competence.

The Fear steps in as the other teacher on Tristan's remedial team without any objections. As a full member, unquestionably, of the fabled Cobra Unit, everyone supports Tristan learning his clumsy way around guns, but the Fury does not have an ego that makes him claim every area of expertise as his own. His Boss doesn't need the excuse of teaching to wrap her strong, sure arms around Tristan's furred ones and point them at the target; she admits that she'd distract from the learning process, with a predatory smile that matches her son's, except for the fangs. 

The Pain is adept with more than his favorite shotgun, but finds hornets a more inspiring topic; the End lends his gunsmithing tools to the cause, handing them to the Fear with his blessing before he settles in a sunny spot nearby to observe, photosynthesize and probably nod off. The End has the wisdom gained from a few lifetimes of experience with firearms, but he's secure in the ability of the next generation (and the next after that) to take up the torch, as far as the basics go. 

The two ocelots naturally lean against each other as they sit on a log by the table, while Adam calmly explains out loud, showing his father each moving part like any good instructor. Tristan can't help purring as he turns a shiny cartridge over in his fuzzy paw-hand. Adam can spin a revolver around his finger, or toss two of them hand-to-hand like a movie cowboy whose gun is loaded with blanks; Tristan has a hard time keeping small, round objects from falling to the table. His son is being ever so patient with him. Across the clearing, Tristan can hear the Pain whisper to the Boss that it's _"cute as shit"_ to watch both of their tails and ears swing and swivel from behind, lively with that cat curiosity that's a stereotype and also completely true.

Adam might not be listening, and Tristan doesn't mind the comment. The Pain is their friend, like everyone else here, and like everyone else here has his own peculiarities. It's also obvious that watching a happy family moment is more exotic to the gathered Cobras than seeing two men with twitching ocelot tails.

His seasoned Boss just creates her own teachable moment and points out their hand-signs to the Pain. She knows her man's tells, but it isn't difficult to pick out both the paw-muffled signs and the feline body language for _"you're so smart and I am so very proud of you,"_ just by watching what Tristan does that makes Adam squirm and skip right ahead to the next bullet point in his lecture on Guns And You. Tristan doesn't want to make his son self-conscious, but he's just so happy to be here next to him at last, both of them alive and free. Adam _is_ such a clever young man, though; he winces a little at the compliments, but he doesn't leave his father's side.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

After they've tried out everything they have in the team armory, the Fear modifies a rifle for Tristan's big paw-hands. He promises to reload the magazines with their fiddly little brass cartridges after any engagement with hostiles, if Adam or the Boss don't beat him to it. Tristan can reload a shotgun just fine without dropping those ribbed plastic shells, but they all agree that if Tristan is in shotgun range, he's also in range to spring and defend his family with his wildcat claws unsheathed.

Tristan's far vision is excellent, he has spent a lifetime creeping silently, and his Boss' follower-spirits are eager to help him adjust for wind and distance. All his special rifle needs is an extended trigger for his furry, less-than-human fingers, and a larger trigger guard to accommodate it, and him. They could do without a trigger guard completely, Tristan volunteers, but the Fear insists on certain standards in his tinkering.

The End isn't territorial about having a backup sniper on the team; he dubs their project Tristan's _"arthritis gun"_ and laughs until he hawks something up, which isn't a really high threshold for the End. Tristan takes this amusement, too, in the spirit which it was meant, and makes eye contact with the parrot on the End's shoulders. The wise old bird is still leery of Adam, but hasn't ever minded about the older ocelot-man, even before Tristan started bringing her a deferential sprig of berries when he returned from the hunt.

Jack, tight-lipped as ever, sits himself down to watch Tristan's education from a little bit closer and without the same air of avuncular indulgence as the other old soldiers. Tristan knows, from listening to the spirits of vanquished enemies that follow the second-youngest Cobra, that there isn't anything new Jack can learn about guns here. Jack doesn't break in with any contributions either, but he seems to be watching Tristan more than he has his eyes on Adam, his blooded paramour.

The unspoken communication between two cat-men has Adam, on Tristan's tip-off, watching Jack right back, but surreptitiously as befits their feline birthright. At the same time, it's just like a mother to have eyes in the back of her head; Tristan's Boss alights next to Jack and mutters something to her protégé.

"Hmm," Jack finally interjects, standing at Tristan's shoulder. "Boss says... uh, she doesn't want to see you pinch your hand." 

There's a lot to understand in the moment. The dead soldiers who follow Jack are a rowdy bunch, and some of them are loudly upset that they won't get to see how high Tristan jumps when he bruises himself with the operating slide. (A couple of them go on to explain that that's how you learn; the rest are just eager to watch a rookie suffer.) The Boss stands back, masterful as ever, but looks like she expects _something_ to happen. Jack is thinking, but those deep thoughts Jack can have that haven't even formed enough to bubble to the surface, as he looks between Adam and Tristan.

"Here," Adam says, finally. When he's decided something, he has a set to his face that's as final as his mother's, and he indicates for Jack to join them, on the empty stretch of log-bench to Tristan's other side. "Dad's going to need all the help he can get. No offense, Dad."

Of course Tristan could never take offense from his beloved son; the only reason Tristan even _tried_ to stop Adam from killing him, when they first met again, was so Adam wouldn't run the risk of feeling bad about it later. Jack sits down and demonstrates a safer grip with his own human hands, then matter-of-factly puts them, calloused, strong and certain, over Tristan's paws to mold them into position. Jack's hands might be as clever as Adam's, but Tristan doesn't feel the need to call them perfect. Hands are unremarkable on a human body that is not his Boss' nor his part-cat son's.

Tristan does still thank Jack for teaching him, after he has removed his paw-hands from where Jack placed them on the rifle (and put them back on again, to prove he understands and can do it alone). Tristan signs his thanks slowly, now that Jack has joined the conversation. Because Adam _is_ such a clever boy, one who takes after his amazing mother in all the ways Tristan had ever hoped, he doesn't mind at all when Tristan calls the two of them helpful boys, and thanks them for being so patient with a clumsy old cat-man.

Jack understands Tristan's careful signing--and the other two can tell that by how he grumbles and looks away, more affected than any grown man should be. Tristan has had an easy amity with Jack, even after the polite distance in the early days, when Adam's deep instincts were telling him to drive a rival ocelot away from his potential mate, and Tristan didn't want to intrude on his son's potential happiness. 

Tristan knew that he was never a romantic prospect for Jack; Jack is a fine specimen of male beauty, in his rough way, but after some consideration, that doesn't seem to be Tristan's taste. As the second strike against him, Jack, like nearly every other human on the planet, is not Tristan's Boss, so that's the end of that. As long as she wills it, Tristan is entirely hers.

Maybe Tristan was too distracted by that kind of love to understand what else was going on, in their newly-reunited family. Adam is secure in his hold on Jack now, but Jack remembers, even if he never really understood, that there was _something_ about getting close to Tristan. That's part of why Jack is such a good operative, the Boss says; even if he doesn't understand his instincts and his intuition, he listens to them. Jack is wild in his own way, like that; "wild" doesn't mean out of control, but bent toward a solitary, silent survival.

Tristan puts his arm across Jack's shoulders for a moment, to get his attention again, then frees his paw to tell Jack, specifically, that Jack is a very good boy. That particular species of praise isn't something Adam has ever coveted, and they can both see that Jack understands Tristan's signing at once, and would like to turn his head again except for the soldier's instinct to keep an eye on something active in the immediate area that is new and confusing.

 _You are a good friend. You are Adam's good man,_ Tristan signs. Jack grunts under his breath as he comprehends, so Tristan plunges ahead. Adam barely needs any signing, for most things, but Jack is a young human and isn't tuned in to that unspoken ocelot wavelength. _You gave my Boss a son when she didn't have Adam. My Boss was sad, alone. You belong to her and to my son, now. That makes you a-little-bit my son. If you would like._

Jack says nothing, and his hands stay sniper-still, but his body is next to Tristan's on the bench, and a tension in his posture says that yes, he very much would like. Adam's got a young man's energy to apply to an ocelot's territoriality, but Jack is his, and his parents are very much his, so Tristan doesn't have to look over to his other side to know he hasn't overstepped in his son's eyes.

Maybe gotten too sentimental, though; this is probably a lot for young Jack, and a lot for an afternoon of gun instruction by the camp table. Adam has his mother's pragmatism, too, and he slaps his own human hand, ocelot claws sheathed, on Tristan's back.

"Dad, shit, are you going to start composing poetry about me getting laid? Mom may fall for that, but it's not going to get you out of target practice. You're with Jack and me, now." 

Tristan looses his tension in his breathy cat-laugh, and Jack relaxes enough to chuckle. A simple man saved by his partner's wiles and their complimentary strengths; how familiar, in this family. Tristan calls Adam his _clever_ boy, again, and takes a blissful moment to gather one of them in each arm, free and surrounded by his family, his friends and a didactic abundance of munitions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm pretty sure guns are the sixth Love Language, in _Metal Gear_ canon.


	10. Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!

The Boss is a woman of action, so it means even more that she cares so much for her weatherbeaten old cat-man's delicate feelings. She addresses Tristan's concerns before he even finishes signing them with his paws: there is probably theft in its history, yes, but this nondescript cargo plane is much less stolen than the commandeered boat that brought his Joy out to Tristan's lonely territory in the first place. 

Because his Boss is a genius and a wonder, they're making a cash profit on the trip they'd be taking anyway. The plane's most recent owners, here in South America, would like very much to return the airplane to their friends behind the Iron Curtain. This needs to be done under the radar, literally, and the owners are willing to pay a very reasonable delivery fee to have members of the legendary Cobra Unit fly their assumed property to a mutually-beneficial dropoff point. 

The Fury mutters something about how he would only expect the Workers to be compensated fairly for their labor. He seems happy, for the Fury. Part of that might be from settling into a cockpit again, about to take flight on metal wings. The Fury wouldn't ever say so, but Tristan knows they're in the hands of an excellent pilot. For all he's indifferent to his personal survival, the Fury undertakes his pre-flight checklist like a penitent kneeling for prayer, ardent and eager for communion. 

The spirits of airmen and pilot-cosmonauts gather around him with their sad eyes and matching crew-cuts like a collection of semi-translucent choirboys, peering at the instrumentation along with their living comrade. They've all told Tristan that the Fury isn't to blame, and they've all watched Tristan make his attempts to convince the Fury of the same. The Fury's vision of Comrade Kubasov is a wraith with hollow pits for eyes and scorched flesh sloughing off of a bony, accusing finger. This bears no resemblance to the spirit in an immaculate flight suit who's begging Tristan to tell his old commander that little Mitya is _fine,_ really, and wants him to be at peace. It'd be a losing argument even if Tristan didn't have to waste a few minutes at the outset, establishing with his paw-signs through the Fury's guilt and rage, that it's Dmitry coming through, with his strawberry blond hair and a story about the time his bootlace snapped and the man who would become the Fury fixed his junior comrade up with parachute cord and minutes to spare.

Back in the cockpit, the Fury slaps Tristan warmly on the back and spreads out the map to explain the flight plan, even though the details must now be re-calculated from scratch by Adam, learning by showing his work under the Fury's eyes. Tristan has never before flown in an airplane without first being drugged into a stupor, cinched tight with straps or at least shut up in a sturdy crate; he's already cat-curious about what the windows will show, at altitude, but he knows that he shouldn't burden the Fury with the reminder of his own institutional mistreatment. The pilots' spirits are smiling along with their living comrade's happiness. That isn't a frequent occurrence, and their eyes, shining bright, are still shadowed.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

There are only four members of the Cobra Unit coming on this preliminary mission: the Fear, the Boss, Adam and Tristan, who is still a little surprised that he counts. Tristan wasn't surprised to learn that his Boss is already an expert airman, because she is so many wonderful things, and he isn't surprised that Fury makes good on every bit of his threat to teach Adam to be a master of the skies. The Fury is a man who is scrupulous with his word.

His Boss has a passion for evasion, flying low and deploying silent paratroopers, all of which she promises to teach her son, in the proper time. The Fury is determined to teach Adam the fundamentals: troubleshooting, maintenance, takeoff and landing while _not_ on fire or under fire... at least, at first. The Fury has developed aviation headsets for Adam and Tristan's ocelot ears, as a joint engineering project with the Fear. The outer cat ear is more flexible than a human's and use the standard headphone cans, but their earholes are higher up on their skulls, too, and that turned out to need another strap. The Fury rejects all compliments and thanks; he must protect his comrades' hearing, and they must all be able to communicate in the air.

"Then, in circle view port, from thermosphere, I saw entire world-- _everything,_ young Adam--all as one. After that, return to Earth. Fast, hot. I was reborn, but birth is... difficult time. Boss, mother, also knows this." 

During the scores of flight hours that will take them to the next leg of their journey, there is ample time for philosophical tangents (in English, which, the Fury emphasizes to his apprentice, _is language of international aeronautics_ and must also be respected). 

Tristan sees that Adam has a keen analytical insight; he's excellent at differentiating psychologically-meaningful digressions from the practical information being given by a qualified but slightly-unhinged professional. That's another skill Adam had to learn while he was pretending to be a mute animal-boy--while his father failed to rescue his innocent son from an underground laboratory. Tristan allows himself a moment for useless sadness before he admits that he's wallowing in it. Adam's insight is another pure-strain echo of his mother: the ability to immediately assess a complex situation and formulate a plan, all alone and in his head and nothing but practical, the weakness of sentimentality put aside for later. If ever.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

There's more than one reason for Tristan to come on this mission. Of course, the first reason is because he never wants to lose his Joy again. Tristan is in the unfamiliar position of being among humans who care about what he wants, and standing by the one human who can ensure it.

His Boss is accustomed to getting what _she_ wants, using force strictly as necessary. As soon as she finishes briefing him on the membership requirements of the Mile-High Club, she explains that Tristan can expect to have more obligations than warming her cot. Her Spartan philosophy could never allow herself a pure luxury, and her tactical mind can see the use to be made of anything, even a failed experiment like Tristan. 

If everything goes as planned, which it has occasionally done, this mission will be more like a business trip. This calm is unfortunate for Adam, who shares his mother's thirst for action, but a good first taste of the world outside. Their first taste; Tristan knows that metaphors are pretty, but he can't expect walking among the underbelly of civilization to be like his twenty years alone in the jungle. The Boss cares for her man as well as her son; Adam probably won't get to use his claws or his new pistols for a while, but Tristan can worry a little less because of it. His Boss, too, although she doesn't give her own comfort a second thought.

She understands the romance of taking Tristan on a belated honeymoon, but his Boss is a practical woman. Her will is unstoppable, but she knows they need other human people's intel and transportation and supplies in order to to free the other people who are like Tristan and Adam. The Cobra Unit's black-to-grey market contacts and their former under-the-table employers are excellent prospective business partners, and are likely to be "haunted all to shit, considering. You said I have my own ghosts, Tristan. The ones who--hm. The warriors who fell beside me in battle but still walk with me into history; that's how you wrote it down." His Boss looks into his eyes and Tristan feels the impact of his words, his childish scrawl, being remembered by _her._

"While we're on-site, I want you to recon their ghosts. Their rivals, their family, the guys who fucking died because the guns they sold were shit. You listen to all of them, Tristan, and then you tell me the parts I need to know." 

She's found a way to make him useful; he's going to be useful. Tristan can hardly believe his luck, and his Joy.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

"Let's not tell certain folks, but I just don't think I ever want to go to space," Adam updates Tristan in the cockpit. His son has had enough flying time to be entrusted with keeping a level heading through clear air, so today there's nobody but Tristan taking a stretch in the co-pilot's seat. The Boss and the Fury believe in air safety, but a Cobra Unit-level of air safety, which allows an awful lot of freedom for their recruits. His Boss says responsibility builds confidence. Tristan doesn't doubt her, but he'd still be worried, about his beloved son's life if not his own, if he hadn't asked several of the pilots in his Boss' loyal spirit legion to stay nearby. The dead-in-arms' pledge to an eternal watch has not changed; the spirits accept explicit permission to act through Tristan's body, if clumsy paws are needed to suddenly take the yoke.

"Sure, the space pictures look neat, but there's not a lot to do once you're up there, and then there's the radiation and eating out of tubes. Mom and the Fury got a lot out of their trips, but, ehh. I think I'd land and the first thing they'd want would be a tiebreaker. Entire world united in peace, or entire world bein' cleansed by the flame. Mom's better than I'da thought at agree-to-disagree, and I know you and the Fury are pals, so I don't want to be the asshole who upsets the balance. I reckon they can flip a coin and leave me out of it."

Tristan is forever surprised by how smart his son is, how acute a judge of behavior and with a human voice to speak his thoughts out loud, when he's had enough of listening. Ocelot-man laughter doesn't sound completely different from human laughter, although it's more of a chuckle with a whisper to it. Adam takes a quick break from the window to look over and throw Tristan a cocky grin, pointing his fingers at his father like a cowboy's guns; he knows he's a clever boy, and he knows that he's playing to an appreciative audience.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

Adam takes the plane up and down with increasing ease, although he doesn't sit in on the last landing. The Boss' spirits confirm what the two experienced pilots say--any landing you walk away from is a good one--but now that they're back in industrialized society, there are appearances to consider. They'll be handing the airplane over to its semi-legitimate owners, who don't need to be worried or be inspired to check it for scratches, or dicker over the previously-negotiated delivery fee.

The Boss and the Fury are infamous already, blonde and burned and both waving from the cockpit. Tristan and Adam look like a seat-filler and the untested next generation, respectively, if they keep the winter gear on and don't grin or flick their tails around under their jackets. Father and son are perfectly unremarkable as they carry the gear to the truck. Tristan is just pleased to be counted, and he can tell that Adam is reminding himself that he doesn't have to wait much longer before he can teach the world his own name.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I worry that a lot of this series is just me flailing until I can grab an excuse to start writing about ways the Boss is hot again.


	11. I should buy a boat.

Having already believed him to be dead once, the Boss has had the usual misgivings about taking her lover with her to war. She knows that safety is never a given. Even her sturdy adoptee Jack could be killed by one bullet, if it were the right one in the right place. Still, on the the battlefield there are more candidates for the right bullet than there are in the savage jungle. It's even more than an analysis of risks, with Tristan; claws and fangs as lethal as Adam's, he just doesn't have the zeal for fighting that she recognizes as a part of herself in her son. 

She's always wanted to make a world that's safe for Tristan and other people who are like Tristan, and not only "like him" in the sense that they have animal ears and tails. The Boss knows that any world will have room for the people who are like her; no matter what, no matter where, there will always be war. When Tristan fights--and feelings or not, he does fight--she knows he does it all for her. 

Better that they be together, then. She'll make their lives last as long as she can, in this world. Tristan has some ideas about what happens to people in the next world over, and the Boss hasn't surrounded herself with her own hand-picked team of experts in order to ignore their advice.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

It's not even a war she's taking him to, not at first. An army travels on its stomach, when it's not riding in mechanized transport with falsified papers, and her career has proven the old saw that you can get more with a kind word and a gun than with just a kind word. To get those guns in the first place, you need cash, and the _right_ words. The process will be routine for the Boss, tedious for the Fury, and educational for Adam, so she isn't self-indulgent by bringing Tristan along as well. When there's nothing to guard, you don't leave just one man behind.

None of that even counts Tristan's other abilities; she needs to stop thinking about him like he's a gangster's pretty moll. He's soft but he's strong. Tristan is the Boss' weakness made flesh, but he can still play it smart and even shoulder a rifle to her satisfaction. This is all new, for the Boss: she understands duty and loyalty, but she's never had to remind herself to separate a soldier's utility from his _meaning._ To her, personally.

On the Boss' most trusted contact list, there's nobody who's going to crane his neck and look past her, trying to find the man who's the brains of the operation. There is a relief that she can see, when they file in for a meeting; the Boss is the Boss, the Fury is a known quantity in these parts, and Tristan doesn't look like a combatant. The _bratva_ is more concerned that the Boss' obvious rookie might get buck fever with his shiny new pistols. That isn't Adam's fault; her son is doing his best to keep a stony face. His effort is commendable, although it also appears to be genetic; the Boss can see the more astute of her business partners working out the family resemblance. The smart ones are smart enough not to say anything out loud.

Tristan's gestures mark him as mute, right from a nod of introduction. Even with the eyes of love, the Boss knows that her man reads as obviously (nonspecifically, with his hat on) fucked-up. Her contacts are interested, but not at all surprised, that he's in her party. Of course the Boss would bring a bookkeeper type along to their friendly business meeting; of course, since he's the Boss', he'd have _some_ kind of dysfunction. The smart money doesn't bring it into conversation, because it's well-known that the Boss has the will to break eggs for her omelets. If one of her men has a face full of bumps and welts, it's all in service of commanding an instant hornet tornado, and asking for details might bring on a demonstration of whatever _this_ guy can do. 

Better they should move on to the next step of negotiations and offer coffee, or vodka, and snacks. The Boss understands and appreciates the courtesy; hospitality is universal, and comes in degrees more subtle than offering quarter to a defeated enemy. She's not the government and she's not their family, so it doesn't matter that she used to be official military, or that the Boss took government funds and munitions when her interests overlapped with theirs. The Cobra Unit isn't applying for membership in the Russian mob, just making a business deal. She nods Tristan toward the plate of oily sprats he's already eyeing, as is her right as the head of her own family organization. The Boss pours up vodka for Adam first, a smaller amount than she distributes to the Fury and herself; to each according to his needs.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

The Boss chose a good team to bring along to Eastern Bloc business meetings. Left on their own in sunny South America, she's certain that the Pain and the Fear haven't talked Jack into anything too stupid. If they have, the End will have the details for her, between his phlegmy chuckles. Her men's assignment is simple, with a lot of leeway: they need to scout out a better location for a camp that is about to grow exponentially, when the Boss takes her entire unit out on the hunt and returns with the first wave of Tristan's compatriots.

The other experimental subjects, the animal-people; Tristan says it's like they're all citizens of a country that never was but ought to be. The Boss can spell "diaspora" for him, with its tricky long _i,_ but she never would have picked out the word herself. She smiles and writes it down for his notes, her own clear hand on the page with his painstaking scrawl. He'll be the one she tasks with writing an official declaration, some day, but the Boss isn't going to burden him with that now. She's his commanding officer, as well as his partner; the first one means she's the one in charge of the big picture, and the second means she doesn't want to make Tristan worry.

The Fury is good backup here; outside of battle, he's calmly philosophical in English and Russian, and can issue warnings or requisition ammunition in several more useful languages. Just standing silently next to her, it's easy to tell when he's thinking about the Earth in flames. The Fury isn't too distracted to be an asset in the boardroom; his resting facial expression alone is a helpful contribution to their negotiations. 

Regrouping in their ambassadors' suites, barns or flophouses, depending, the Fury supports Tristan and vice versa. The Boss knows about Tristan's sadness--he shared with her his self-given name, all those years ago--but she also knows that after he mistook her for dead, he still forced himself to live, for their son and for his love of her. Tristan had twenty lonely years in the jungle; that's half a Moses in the desert, with only the memory of his pillar of fire. It's wonderful to see her man make living friends now, but she knows that even without them, Tristan's heart is too strong to pine away and join his dead ones. 

As their commander, the Boss takes care to learn her unit's strengths and weaknesses. The Fury's too much of a professional to crash an aircraft he's entrusted with, and his parasites won't let him die to the flame alone. He's still the man who has built himself a multipurpose flamethrower/jetpack and on angry days he uses it for effect as much as strategy. It would be hypocritical for the Boss to scold him--that's exactly the spirit and dedication that earned the Fury a place on her team--but even pyrophilic symbiotes can't help if her Flame Soldier gets too furious to steer and rages himself head-first into the side of a barn. 

She sees the Fury sit next to Tristan now, truly at rest in their off-hours. Her husband leans on his arm in a way that's both brotherly and feline, while the Fury speaks in low, rumbling Russian to him. The subject is still fire and death, but in a conversational way, with digressions about avionics engineering and how they might grow hard-rind squash in the kitchen garden, when they have a permanent home base. The Fury is no less furious, and no less loyal to the Boss and her Cobra Unit, but now he has a comrade whom he doesn't want to burden with his loss.

Freed from his concrete cage and out in the unsuspecting world, Adam still listens to his mother, and is learning from _everything_ according to her wishes and his inherited nature. Her son sees his mother's strength and his father's weakness. Adam's smart; he can look closer and see the opposite just fine, and doesn't even narrow his eyes.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

At the meeting table, the Boss goes over cargo manifests with a steely eye, while Tristan silently talks to ghosts. He's good at keeping a lid on it, as befits her personal mystic, maybe better than the Boss will be by the second hour of discussing all the minutiae that gets in the way of honest action.

That's hyperbole; the Boss has discipline, and she barely had to be taught. Adam sits next to his father and visibly dotes on him. It's cute as shit seeing that at home, but her son is being smart. He's cast himself as the rookie who's been tasked with keeping an eye on the gang's pet cripple and really, _really_ doesn't want to screw it up, not in front of the Boss. Adam's seen as many mafia movies as he's seen cowboy movies and hell, probably pirates, too; the Boss has had men with less background to work with, and worse habits to beat out of a recruit.

Tristan's half in another world, and that's the literal truth, when it's the Boss' spirit medium soldier. She likes that "half," and how he respects her too much to bring her anything that claims to be cosmic truth or enlightenment, other than his eternal love. The Boss knows that kind of declaration is a standard for a romantic partner, but she still feels his devotion, a warm spot in her heart. That's an unmistakable indicator that the Boss has also succumbed to romanticism, but if you're aware of a weakness, you can mitigate it. For her, that's half the battle.

Adam's penmanship is already better than his father's. The Boss wouldn't even compare them, except that saying so makes Tristan happy. Tristan keeps his glasses sparkling and his face clear of cats' whiskers and looks like a model citizen, apart from the wrapping that makes his paws into plausible hands. His pupils are a giveaway, but not as much as dark glasses would be; the Boss guessed right that nobody much wants to make eye contact with her crew. Tristan makes the most subtle signs he can, neither hiding from the Avtoritet nor being rude about it; her mute gets easy leeway, as the Boss had planned. They have their ocelot almost-telepathy, father and son, and then there's Morse tapped on Adam's leg when Tristan's messages get intricate. The Boss had had concerns about that arrangement, but it's proven to be beneficial to both of their spelling. 

When they're alone, she can get the rest of the details straight from her informant, or have Adam explain that his _all-clear-go-ahead_ signal was a summary of his father's "they only killed the man from the Directorate when he wouldn't stay bought, and all of the mutilation was _post mortem."_ Tristan, with his hands freed, is eager to tell her that the ghost of an NCO is admitting his own mistakes in life and wants to send a very short message to a particular investment banker, if the Boss will allow the use of their stationery and Adam's hands.

The Boss snorts. She knows that Tristan is sentimental; maybe someone has to be. Bleeding heart, silent paws and his illegal ocelot's ears, he's still the perfect negotiator for her to send out next, to make their most important deal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unsure whether to tag this for Period-Typical, But Weirdly Supportive, Ableism. 
> 
> The Boss knows it's not about the texture of a man's skin, which is covered in stings and welts, but about the contents of a man's body, which is full of giant hornets that he can command to rocket out and attack people.


	12. Oh Hai There

No, see, Sergei will tell you _right away_ about the secret government projects.

It's more like fatherly advice, though; of course he won't tell you _about_ the secret government projects, because if you're thinking about getting in on the lower levels of secret bullshit as a job opportunity, you've got to get used to the _secret_ part right away; that part, they really mean. That's probably the main drawback, though; Sergei would definitely recommend it to a young person casting about for a career in these troubled economic times.

In his own case, he was enjoying easy work, good and plentiful food, regular time off, and then a piece of experimental technology got destroyed--no fault of Sergei's own--and you know how it is with blame rolling downhill. That part's the same no matter where you go. 

Luckily, his supervisor was too busy being a scientist to be any good at politics, and was reasonably grateful for years of solid performance. Sergei still got a recommendation and a transfer to grunt work on a different, unrelated, but still Top Secret project. Slightly less easy work, still pretty decent food situation, and then after a few years, part of _that_ experimental technology goddamn _lands_ on him. Still no fault of Sergei's, and this time there's documentation to prove it and someone even more junior the commissar can point a finger at. The upshot is that all of Sergei's parts are still attached, although his leg has seen better days, and the stipend-slash-hush money started coming before he even hobbled out of the hospital.

(All Sergei's important lower-body parts still work, too. You've seen these photos of his kids, right?)

Thing is, nearly all of this version of his story is true. There are details missing, sure, but the only actual lie is that the first piece of experimental technology--which happened to be an otherwise unremarkable young man with ocelot ears and a tail--didn't really get destroyed. Subject 0051 was not the first piece of The People's property to get marked down as _lost_ when he was really just creatively relocated; Dr. E mailed a crate full of stolen cat-man off to a friendly-looking part of the jungle instead of diverting a shipment of medicinal ethanol to his own dacha, but otherwise the mechanism was the same. 

Somebody had to take the fall for it, and Sergei was fine to go on record as the idiot who let such a monetary investment in werecat breeding "die" on his watch. The alternative, coming down from on high, was for the cat-man to actually die, and by that point Fraidy Cat had become a good pal and reliable fourth seat in the lab's weekly poker game, even if he couldn't take his turn as dealer because of his big furry mitts. Call him sentimental, but Sergei thinks that ought to mean something.

The second half of the career arc is true, too, except that the other big-deal science project didn't much _land_ on Sergei; it whacked his ass right into the side of a hangar. You can build a giant tank, you can put nukes on it, why not! You can give it a complicated locomotion system with a hover-deal and treaded arm-things that _somebody_ probably got five patents and a medal about, but it's like they say: safety starts with the nut behind the wheel. The last he heard, the top scientists and the rest of the grunts are still off in the middle of nowhere, farting around on improved versions of the Giant Expensive Basically a Tank. No hard feelings; Sergei wishes them good luck in their endeavors.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

With a bonus for serving in silence and getting moderately fucked up doing it, plus his respectable pension, Sergei has leveraged himself an import/export concern as well as a family, and both of them are thriving, thank you. The business is named Radunsky Imports, although Radunsky isn't Sergei's last name. It wasn't the name of the last guy to run the place, either, so by this point it might as well be tradition, and the sign out front is holding up just fine for it. Waste not, want not.

Sergei's older children are out learning the ropes while a few tabby cats sleep on shelves and amid the boxes. The cats are sleek and well-fed and offer their faces for a head-rub; you can't let the beasts go hungry, just because they're too damn good at pest control to have any mice left. If you fail to provision your standing army in a time of peace, who will you have when it's time for war? Or when the rats come back, or when it's time to seize control of the State again; Sergei is one of those _good_ bosses who needn't be forced up against the wall. It's easy to get distracted from the philosophy of expedience as a grizzled tomcat rubs his chin on Sergei's pant leg and of course gets his ears scratched in return. 

This family business is almost entirely above-board, as far as volume goes, but the real profit--shh--comes from the special jobs, the ones that pay extra for discretion. If he had shareholder meetings, there would be a nice pie chart that showed income inversely proportional to the itemized amount of cargo, but while Sergei keeps his books neat, he doesn't go out of his way to make them easy for other people to interpret.

Sergei's bread and butter starts with gauging an individual client's comfort level re: crime and/or light treason. Some people are cheerful about being the necessary pirates and scoundrels that a balanced society requires. Some people are Party loyalists who just happen to have, on this day, the only morally valid reason to move someone or something in or out of a particular border without the appropriate documentation. People on the first half of that legal spectrum are easier to work with. They're usually quick to pick up on Sergei's nod, stub out their cigarette, and find somewhere else to loiter before politeness requires him to introduce them to a member of the righteous second half.

This occupational familiarity with clandestine business practices also means that Sergei isn't _too_ surprised when there's someone suddenly in his office. It's a sunny afternoon, but with the blinds pulled against glare, it's dark enough to approximate the midnight meetings that kick off his most lucrative contracts.

In Sergei's experience, his clients like to send a couple of big guys, or bring the big guys along with, to stand there on either side while they try to talk tough. Like he said, in this line of work, it's just something to consider when you're buying the guest chairs. A slim and solitary presence that got in _somehow_ other than the door--dressed for stealth, with gloves and hood and all--is a little more concerning. It starts to feel less like business as usual and more like serious business when the guy doesn't make any demands, and doesn't say anything to Sergei's hospitable offer of a drink. 

Sergei's on edge already, so when what happens next is the guy lunging for him, he's already aiming himself towards _that_ desk drawer. Still too slow--the man in black is preternaturally quick on his feet, or maybe even a real-deal ninja. It's a small world, and Sergei ships globally. Guy's little tall for a ninja, though, and then he grapples Sergei into a tactical hold that doesn't choke, and starts to feel suspiciously like a hug.

Sergei's mind is struggling to keep up with the pounding of his heart, and hoping that he's got his kids read into their creative bookkeeping well enough to take over, but then he realizes that there's a deep, low purring on his shoulder, and given that, the two bumps under the ninja's hood are starting to look suspicious.

"Fraidy Cat, you _asshole,"_ Sergei says, and from how much tighter the hug gets, he's right. "I just about shit myself! Guess you couldn't sign me anything in the dark, though."

Fraidy Cat looks like he's doing well, which is confirmed when Sergei leans over to turn on the desk lamp. The hug is easier to wriggle out of because his visitor is busy taking down his hood and his half a ski mask with clumsy paw-hands, and yep, there's those big spotted ears and the fangs. Since Sergei saw him last, Fraidy Cat seems to have grown a set of actual cat whiskers, which are coming back from stubble on either side of his mouth, probably trimmed for just this kind of espionage thing. Well, they'd be ocelot whiskers, but _still._ It makes Fraidy Cat look more obviously inhuman, but unfortunately, no more threatening, especially since during their lost years, someone has seen fit to fix him up with a set of glasses that ought to be on a librarian. Good enough reason to hide his face, though.

"Aw, we got _old,_ big guy. How about that? And I got fat, but you're still looking good. I shouldn't have made fun of your hair back then, yeah? Came back to get me." Fraidy Cat's hair is more white than blond and his hairline is still retreating in the same direction it always was, but in the meantime, Sergei's respectable head of hair suffered a fifth column attack and was taken down from the rear. There's something about an old friend returning, or maybe just one who can't speak; he's rubbing Fraidy Cat's head like you might slap someone's back, and one of those big paw-pads is warm right on his own bare scalp, but it doesn't feel like either of them taking a liberty.

"So how the hell are you, anyway? You need a place to hole up? You can see all of my operation; I can swing you a ride to just about anywhere now, buddy. Maybe not first class, but it'll be a lot more comfortable than that crate we smuggled you out in." 

That's too many questions to throw at a guy who can't actually speak, but Fraidy Cat doesn't look put out. He's cheerful and maybe a little overwhelmed, but then again, Sergei is man enough to admit that he could as well be looking into a furry mirror, as far as that goes. Fraidy Cat's hand-signs are eloquent enough to ask Sergei to wait a moment, one big paw held up, and then he cracks the office door and meows at volume. Sergei knows Fraidy Cat is part ocelot, noble miniature jaguar and all, but if you didn't know and had to guess, he's a dead ringer for well-behaved house cat (and probably a good roommate, for the human half). No lie, his call is adorable, and whoever Fraidy Cat has brought along with him, they at least helped him out with picking an accessible secret code signal.

The venerable tabby that was sleeping under Sergei's desk takes the meow as an opportunity--maybe an invitation--to _leave,_ but the next two men who enter aren't taken off-guard by a sudden cat underfoot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello, this is my _Metal Gear_ OC; [his name is Sergei](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16379033/chapters/38334062) and he's Polish and he's bald and he got hit-and-runned by the Shagohod (a little) no r34 pls!!!ok just ask first :3


	13. Only Dumb Assholes Get in This Box

Given how life at the animal-man labs sped up right after the birth, and all the time and distance that's passed since, Sergei isn't too surprised that he can't exactly remember Fraidy Cat Jr.'s _name._

Fraidy Cat, bless him, would never begrudge the question. He's sitting on the other side of Sergei's desk looking like a cross between the sexton and the sexton's cat, same as he always used to, but the kid only has his dad's eyes in the cat sense. For the ice-carved face those reflective eyes are set in, Sergei sees nothing but the big lady in her kid's steely gaze, and there's no way to be subtle when you're asking what they call Hybrid Zero when he's at home. Sign language saves time with names and pronouns by substituting a lot of pointing, especially when the subject is standing right there to be pointed at, so no clues there.

"This is the boy? Of _course_ he's the boy. God, you look just like your mother! She was a hell of a woman. ...I mean, she still is, right? Anyway, I changed your diaper, young man." The kid allows a handshake--regular hands, no claws--and Fraidy Cat chuffs at that with a fond smile, so Sergei figures he should stay ahead of any correction. "All right, I watched your father change your diaper, but I did the safety pins. You have to admit that part's essential."

Sergei is happy to confirm that the skills honed in embarrassing his own kids may be applied to any species of teenager, and moves on to worrying about his third visitor, who does _not_ have spotted ocelot ears. Or any ears at all, it looks like, although he isn't taking off his hat to confirm it. There's also facial scarring that used to be some pretty serious burns, but Sergei can keep his cool about things like that. He's worked as a zookeeper for weaponized hybrid animal-people, transferred over to an experimental nuclear tank/robot workshop, and now he's got sailors and longshoremen and all kinds of semi-retired goons on his payroll. Sergei knows he's lucky to have a limp and a pension; not everyone gets this far in business with their good looks intact.

The burned guy doesn't say anything; it's a quiet room, all told, with Fraidy Cat signing his heart out and only Sergei talking out loud. The kid looks a little bored, or like he's trying hard to project boredom so he doesn't look like a rube. As for Mr. Grilled Kotlet in the corner, it's hard to read a guy without eyebrows, and Sergei doesn't want to stare. It does present a lucky opportunity: although he's met Fraidy Cat Jr. as a babe-in-arms, Fraidy Cat's new friend is new to Sergei, too, so it's not a breach of etiquette to outright ask Fraidy Cat to introduce him by name. Poor Fraidy Cat probably doesn't get to be the group spokesman much, considering, so he has no need to look that embarrassed when Sergei reminds him.

Fraidy Cat's never had the most nimble paws, but heaven help him, he always tries his goddamn best. There's a lot of context-dependent nuance in any sign language. Sergei's out of practice talking to his ex-captive, so he can be forgiven for assuming that what Fraidy Cat is saying is that his big, scarred-up friend is _angry._ No, he isn't? Well, you have to admit he _looks_ angry, so you can see why I'd assu--all right, here comes spelling, and _that's_ always an ordeal.

"Hey, Fraidy Cat, I haven't had to read your fingers in twenty years! Slow it down, yeah?"

"It's his code n--his name is Fury. _The_ Fury," Fraidy Cat Jr. finally butts in. The relief Sergei feels at that just rolls right into how cute it is to see Fraidy Cat beaming at his boy. He isn't upset at being cut off by verbal speech for the ten thousandth time in his life, just proud of his son's ability. Sergei's pretty glad for the clarification, too. 

"He's one of the specialists in Mom's--our unit. Short-range incendiary weapons, plus he's an ace pilot. The Fury was one of the first cosmonauts--"

"Adamska, I do not need you to boast for me. ...The Space Agency has not invited me on the good-will tours, and I have not attempted to draw my pension. In my retirement, I am a simple cook." 

Well, the burned guy's sepulchral voice would be scarier if it didn't have the distraction of answering Sergei's earlier question. _Adam_ doesn't look scared, or more annoyed than before, to be so gently admonished (and with such a cute diminutive) in mixed company. Of course Fraidy Cat would be the guy to adopt himself a big crazy uncle, to make sure his kitten's family wants for nothing. Anyway, the two of them seem like they're watching young Adam to see if he took some avuncular advice about first impressions, which is kind of a funny look for a guy with fangs and shiny predator irises over his grandpa glasses, and another guy who looks like a walking scab.

"So yeah, Dad's ex-laboratory tech Sergei, this is the Fury, Flame Soldier of the Cobra Unit. The Fury, this is Sergei, who helped Dad escape. Say, did Dad tell you he has a name, too? I think he got it when you first knew him, but he wouldn't have wanted to bother you."

It usually helps when people see you as friendly and maybe not too bright, but Sergei has not survived this long as an idiot. After that first slip-up, he does not breathe one single syllable of "Fraidy Cat" out loud, just nods and waits to be introduced to his old friend at last. The name he gets sounds awfully English, especially amidst the spoken Russian they've been using as the _lingua franca_ of business in these parts, but Sergei can just bet that the name came straight from the terrifying lips of Commander Mom and pierced ocelot-eared _Tristan_ here right to his big sentimental heart.

"Tristan, huh? Glad to hear it, Tristan." Sergei grabs one of those huge furry paw-hands and claps Fraidy Cat's back with his other, just like old times. Good for all of them, really. There's only a moment of ice-in-the-spine terror when the Fury drops his own meathook on Sergei's shoulder.

"I am told you showed kindness to my friend," he intones, and _friend_ doesn't sound like a word this guy uses lightly, "when he was a prisoner. I will not forget that."

That's very fucking good to know. It makes a good opening to bring out one of the bottles of vodka Sergei keeps around as necessary office supplies. The Fury knocks it back like a true veteran of the Motherland's air service, which makes up for the father and son ocelot-men pouring gingerly, probably trying to tiptoe around an inexperience with the harder stuff. Sergei's just happy to get the edge off, and that everyone's friends here after all.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

"See, I don't get a lot of opportunity to brag about my methods--that's what you have to expect, working with the black market. No trade shows to go to, so it's still nice to be able to really _talk_ when you talk business, yeah? A lot of clients, this is the first and last time they're ever gonna use the service, plus they're going through a middleman for safety's sake. If you're not paying attention to it, there's nobody who can remind the carrier they're in the _people_ business, once the money's been paid. People say--people _say_ 'human smuggling,' but I like to think of it as refugees. Evacuees, yeah? Just unofficial."

You have to be able to read the room and adjust for your audience; that's honestly the biggest part of Sergei's career skills. The Fury doesn't look any less furious, but Sergei has decided to deal with it the same way he deals with that one _client_ who keeps what's probably a wolf on a leash: pretend it's not there, talk to the man like anyone else, and try to keep at least one body between them if he can do it without being too obvious. The desk counts too, in a pinch.

"I mean, I'm not blowing smoke up your asses and telling you I think I'm some kind of _cruise director_ \--hey, maybe some day! My prices stay competitive with water and toilet facilities and beds, _standard._ They don't get to take that off the table. I mean 'beds' like hammocks, if that's what'll fit, and it's gotta be shit buckets, but more than one, yeah? With a _lid;_ Christ. We don't have guests playing shuffleboard on the promenade deck, but unlike some other shipping concerns, all of my rigs have an escape set up. No doors that lock from the outside only. And there's always at least one fire extinguisher; I don't fuckin' budge on that. I've heard about--shit, sorry."

Sergei also didn't request a detailed job description from the "flame soldier" and/or "simple cook," but even though it's comforting to know Mr. Fury still enjoys a good working relationship with fire, there's basic courtesy to guests and clients. In talks with other back-door clients, Sergei has picked up an underboss' ushanka and not said one single word about the bear's ears he saw when it blew off. Now here he is, alive and well and still subcontracting to this day.

Good old Fraidy Tristan paw-signs his enthusiasm for Sergei's professionalism. He's already refused Sergei's apologies for the rickety crate he got nailed into into all those years ago, for the off-the-books, one-way trip to South America. Tristan's even happier to hear that the cat-and-sundry-animal-people that his missus is planning to spring are going to be riding to their freedom in relative style, and at a special Friends & Family discounted rate.

"Your lady, or your supervisor?" Sergei asks, a point of clarification only. It's not like he's putting every single detail of this contract in writing.

"Her _code name_ is the Boss; Dad's fine with that, and also she is, so yeah." Little Adam has an excellent future as a negotiator or an interpreter; the kid knows just when to jump in and explain a name-sign that's also a designation. "Anyway, Mom's off planning some other parts of the operation with organized crime--hey, I'm following his lead," Junior protests right back at his ocelot papa and weird uncle, pointing at Sergei. "This is your _guy,_ Dad; if he thought there might be bugs, he'd have been talking 'packages' all along. We don't have to say anything cute."

"You sure don't, kid." _Excellent_ prospects, if you ask Sergei. If the kid were in the market, he'd open up a job for him here, contingent on keeping numbers up and his hat on most of the time. Tristan smiles as he withdraws his signed protest at calling a spade a spade, and Only-His-Code Name nods. It's harder to tell without lips, but that's probably a smile, too.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

"Hey, it's me; is Mom around?" Adam asks somebody over Sergei's telephone in what sounds like perfect English, if you trust Sergei's third-ish language ear. He's in the next room over, because some people don't have more than one business phone and therefore aren't suspiciously bourgeois. This also means that executive staff (which is to say: Sergei) doesn't have to listen to the thing ring close-up, the morning after a long night of business meetings. Most days one of the kids is around to answer, working on the accounts, but they know what it means when Dad's got the office blinds down.

"Well, _tell_ her I said 'Cobra Actual,' and ask her if Cobra Actual wants to come to the--Hi, Mom. We're good; we found Dad's guy. Like you said, he's cool. ...Fine, right, _'save me some of the split pea soup,'_ seriously though, no duress."

It's heartwarming how Frai--how Tristan looks just as proud to hand off comms duty to his son as he looked when a spotted-eared baby chewed off the tip of one of the rubber bottle nipples with his tiny fangs. Uncle Crispy seems complacent enough; this is a couple glasses in, and nobody can fault Sergei for his hospitality, so he's going to just assume that's as big as the man's facial burns will let him smile. Life's too short to worry.

"Yeah, definitely. So, do you want us to rough out the timetable while we're here, or do you want to talk to him?" Adam listens and nods, the phone held up at an almost vertical angle to hit his ocelot-ear just right. Funny, how Sergei never thought about how that would work; back at the lab, nobody ever had a reason to put Subject 0051 on the phone. 

"Hey, ты хочешь поговорить с ней?" the kid yells over, hand over the mic for courtesy's sake. No, if it's optional, Sergei absolutely does not _need_ to speak to her. Junior slipping back into Russian for Sergei's benefit is thoughtful, even if it isn't really necessary. The international language of business is money, but Sergei has found English helpful, as long as you don't use it to ask your English-speaking business associates where the money's coming from or what the weather's like in Langley.

Hand signs are pretty useful, too; Sergei isn't the intelligentsia, either, but his lab-learned signs have really taken off around the shipyard. They had directional gestures already, but it's easier on the throat, waving at someone about what exactly they should bring over to you, or how they should fuck themselves in detail. That practice, or maybe being next to Fraidy Cat again, makes _no, thank you_ come out as fluently as it always did from the cat-man's own paws.

"He's good, Mom," little Adam says, and flashes the boss woman's terrifying smile at Sergei with pointy little teeth beneath it. "Thanks for the confidence. ...uh, yes. Roger that."

Sergei's phone line isn't great, and his hearing has suffered enough from time and diesel engines that he might really need those hand signs, one day, so of course he can't hear what the Boss said to her son over the tiny phone speaker. Sergei's older kids are a few years younger than Junior Cat but still right at the age of being embarrassed by the very existence of their parents. From the way Adam quickly averted his eyes, and brief flicker in his cocky attitude, Sergei would put money on Cobra Actual signing off her end of the comms with "I love you."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We needed to get a classic one-sided Ocelot phone call in this series if it killed me. 
> 
> "Can you pick up eggs?"  
> "OF COURSE I WILL... MR PRESIDENT."  
>  _...sigh._ "Love you too Adam; have fun with the interrogation."


	14. when your cat is stuck in the wall and you throw ham on it

Any member of the Boss' highly-trained unit can bypass a lock, as long as they don't mind calling attention to the operation. Stealth isn't a problem when there aren't any enemies left to notice a small-to-medium explosion and the subsequent missing wall. On this mission, it is true that the guards are no longer a concern, but the Boss' intel points to a flammable collection of deeds and dossiers hidden in the walk-in safe they were guarding. Since it's paperwork for the Kemonomimi Project in there, that suggests an additional presence: formalin-preserved specimens that will shatter and throw the proverbial gasoline into the tinderbox.

Delicate situations like this mean that the Fear's delicate skills aren't useless in the presence of everyone else's firepower. The Boss' self-styled "Spider Soldier" is her poisons expert, which only makes sense, and also her best at picking a lock and other tricks from the _demimonde_. That makes sense too, but in a way the Boss won't strain herself trying to delineate. The Fear is welcome to curate his own theme, if he feels like he needs to.

Right now, the Fear is squatting flat-footed at the vault door with his little magnetic stethoscope, expounding on conventional safe-cracking technique while Adam and Jack pay attention to their senior, since they know what's good for them. At this stage of their careers, her recruits should still be acquiring a broad base of skills, if you ask the Boss, and being the Boss means that nobody has to _ask_ her. Jack is a dutiful apprentice, mindful of his education as he watches the Fear click the dial, but there's a piratical glint in Adam's eyes and an angle to his cat's ears that speaks to a burgeoning special interest. Allowing a moment of personal emotion, the Boss is glad she's finally here to teach her son about the world, and also to save the world from her son.

The rest of her unit is in standard positions, watching the doors and hallway in case one of the hostiles was cowering out of sight during the action and gathers up the nerve now to make a last-chance assault. The End is staying outside with his scope and the radio, and the Boss no longer finds anything unusual about trusting the perimeter to the battlefield truce between a parrot and a nest of hornets. "It ain't crazy if it works" was a strong runner-up for her unit's motto.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

Tristan stays close to the action, too, but it isn't so he can sit in on Lock Picking 101 with his son. The Boss knows Tristan's furry hands are capable of some delicate work, with time and practice and forgiveness, the same way she knows the dry warmth from the pads of his huge, gentle fingers. There's no time for any of that in battle.

Her man's built-in night vision and big ocelot ears make him well-suited to take the dark of middle watch, on days that they're encamped and quiet. In a recently-populated place like this, Tristan has another surveillance specialty to make use of. He's long ago answered all the Boss' information-gathering questions, so she knows that although the spirits of the dead are everywhere, there are more of them where people are or used to be. This is especially true when they used to be alive there maybe half an hour ago, and the Boss was the one who killed them. Tristan has told her that the spirits are drawn to her like he's drawn to her, and then his own second-sight nearby is an added bonus, like an enemy code machine left intact and right next to the original mission objective.

The Boss is no judge of poetry and metaphor, but she appreciates that her man tailors his art to his audience. Tristan gives a thorough briefing, even though it'd be faster if he could talk out loud, and if he didn't get fruity with it, and if the Boss had wheels she'd be a streetcar. What she does have is a mute cat-man who sees ghosts, and in an active engagement, he's going to stay where the Boss can keep an eye on him. She can't see the ghosts, but she can see Tristan, so she has a good idea what it's _like_ to see ghosts. 

The Boss wouldn't ever let the dead step all over her like he does, since she doesn't tolerate it in the living. It could be that's why the dead don't dare show their haunted faces to her in the first place. She can't carry the weight for him, but she knows her Tristan is stronger than he looks. Twenty years alone in the jungle talking to ghosts and he never did the Lady of Shalott routine to join them; now that she's here, the Boss just has to keep an eye out and stay ready to shore up his load.

Today, she'll take responsibility for her own fuck-up and admit: the Boss is distracted by the suspense and drama of a safe-cracking, which is new every time you see it. There's also the heartwarming spectacle of Jack and Adam, _her boys,_ with the gears turning in their own little heads. That's sentimentality and it's dangerous, and it's why Adam is the one to notice the problem first, with his own preternatural senses and his unexpected streak of filial piety. 

"Hey, Dad, is something--" he turns back from where he's watching the Fear work his magic.

"Sorrow," the Fury reminds Adam, and he's right: even without witnesses, they're still in the field. That's good practice, even though Tristan doesn't have a civilian identity to protect. The closest thing to identity papers the Boss' cat-men have are going to be behind that door, and it still won't be enough to get either of them a library card.

There's an answer to Adam's question, though, and it comes before he can start asking it again. Tristan makes a deep, round noise from low in his throat, and when the Boss looks beside her, he's as white as a sheet, with sweat beading on his high forehead.

She's heard Tristan suffer in all the normal, physical ways. She's seen him overcome with emotion and zapped with electricity, that uncanny body pain that overrides conscious control. Tristan hasn't been shot yet--the Boss wants to keep that from _ever_ happening, but she's a realist. She's heard him stung by hornets, though, and this doesn't sound anything like that sharp surprise of hurt. It sounds purposeful, the extended, moaning yowls, like Tristan's trying to tell them all something really important, and it's so important that he's completely forgotten that when he speaks, he has to use his paws.

His big hands aren't motionless, though. Next to her, Tristan is twitching, gross motor movements like a man shaking out a leg that's gone to sleep. He twitches and he yowl-moans while the rest of the Cobra Unit freezes, until suddenly Tristan pushes past them and up to the vault door, knocking the crouched Fear over to his side. 

The Fear rolls and is up on his feet without loss of momentum or dignity; it's all in a day's work. Someone else saw something, his comrade has a life-or-death objection; ego takes a back seat to survival, and the Fear is as curious as any cat to find out what the hell is happening.

Tristan's big paw-hands can't hold lock picks but they can grab a dial just fine, and he dials in a combination without any hesitation, craning his head in and out like his eyes can't focus right. The lock clicks true, but before he swings it open, Tristan squeezes his furry fingers into the space between the door and the jamb, knuckles white through the fur, holding something flat as the thick door swings out.

Inside of the unlit vault, there's no immediate revelation, just the expected shelves of files and specimens--and some thick wires spiraling out behind the vault door. The wires lead to a mess of batteries and tape, and to what the Boss knows intellectually is not a huge stockpile of loaves of yellow government cheese. In the flicker of a moment, when the heart picks up for battle, the mind makes strange associations, idle fancies to draw attention away from the instinct that will keep you alive. You have to ignore it, the same way you ignore a flesh wound to avoid a fatal one. 

"Semtex. Shit," the Fear whispers, then it's his turn to dart past Tristan, who's still making those noises--grumbling now, less than groaning--as he slides a metal stay past the spring trigger hidden in the side of the vault door. 

"Hey, on the bright side: it's _free_ Semtex," the Pain notes with a smile, although he does wait to add his punchline until the Fear has finished plucking the wires out of the stack of explosives. It's a windfall for the Cobra Unit, and later the Boss will have to commend the Pain for delegating Jack to squeeze in and start filling a duffel. Now, with their enemies' booby trap disarmed, the Boss has a different action item.

"Something's wrong," Adam says. He's still staring at his father, and now he's looking pale, too, with his own spotted ears slowly going out sideways, like airplane wings. "Dad's not there. ...I think he's got a ghost stuck."

Her son's statement is nonsensical, or, since the Boss doesn't have to file any after-action reports, fucking crazy. There's also nobody on the team who is going to argue with it. The Boss learned Occam's razor, but what she teaches is the KISS principle. Tristan can have a sudden aneurysm or get combat shock, same as anyone else, but the Boss is putting her money on this being a ghost problem.

Despite appearances, the soldiers of the Cobra Unit are human. There's an objective they must accomplish, and with all the hostiles down, securing the classified files will take nothing more glamorous than sweat and time. The Boss has trained them to her own satisfaction; the Fury looks worriedly at Tristan as he passes with an empty hand truck, but he doesn't stick around and duplicate effort. They already have two team members detached to stare into Tristan's glassy, rolling eyes.

That's one for each hand's worth of claws, if it comes to it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Semtex was available on a wide commercial basis in 1964 and manufactured even earlier than that. 
> 
> I feel my timeline is plausible even before you consider the _Metal Gear_ series' canon level of fact-checking. I would probably benefit from a little less fact-checking, but I suppose we all have our demons.


	15. sir, are you aware that you're a cat

"Thank you," she says to the ghost in Tristan's body, and she means it. The Boss isn't a hulking figure by her vital statistics, but Tristan looks up to her all the same. Whoever is wearing his skin can see the same thing, and is using his lean, flexible body to cringe. Tristan's eloquent hands aren't saying anything; he's making strangled noises like someone who'd gotten used to having a human voice box. 

"You've done well. A wrong was committed here, and we will end it. You may feel guilty for your part, but that's in the past. Now you've helped to correct it. You followed orders before," she guesses, "but your own choice was to do the right thing, in the service of freedom."

The Boss isn't a shrink or a chaplain, or a hybrid of the two like Tristan has become in his years of sending the restless dead home on his own dime. One day Adam will be better at all this than she is: big eye, big ears; he's watching and _thinking._ She's seen her grit in her son; when he's got as steady a grip on that as he has on his father's tolerance for complexity, he'll go far.

Their late enemy is also trying to figure himself out. Tristan's borrowed ears still swivel towards her when she speaks, so that must be a built-in reflex. He's staring down at the paw-hands, claws splayed out like the Gill-man in full menace, and blinking like he's trying to clear tear gas from his eyes. 

The Boss doesn't see much of Tristan's third eyelid, so the pearly white half-covering his eyes takes her back to the days when he was captive in the lab. Those paid-off scientists didn't need much excuse to roll out their animal-strength sedatives--understandable given the scope of their operation, the bottom line and the amount they cared about consent. They didn't need to tranq Tristan halfway to shit like they did, out of egghead worry that he might fight the Boss in their nuptial bed.

The Boss _likes_ fighting. She's fighting now, and this is one more time she's going to win.

"Thank you," she says again, and takes one of Tristan's furry hands in her own. The shock of skin is visible on his face, so she doesn't have to squeeze to get his attention. The spirit's attention; as long as Tristan can hear her in whatever half-world he is, she knows she always has him, so her words now are for the dead man scrambling behind his eyes.

"I _see_ you. You've done your part. I appreciate that. Now, you must give him back." 

...That was a misstep. Shit. The Boss feels Adam tense minutely next to her, just as the person in Tristan's body stops being distracted by low-light ocelot vision and starts to realize that he's holding the reins of a hostage situation. Objectively, that's bad, but it also takes this engagement from a séance into an operation where the Boss feels at home. Forget about the ghost part and she's watching a spontaneous humanitarian act turn into a half-assed crime of opportunity. Perfect. The Boss knows what she's facing is the ghost of enemy support staff, not anyone who wore stripes or had an office of his own. 

"These hands belong to one of my men. This body is one of mine," she says, and when she's that sure, there isn't going to be any negotiation. "I decide who uses it. Your body is gone. You can stay, or you can go, but you can't stay in this body. It's _mine."_

The Boss knows Tristan's face, but it's more readable when he's the one behind it. The ghost who shared the combination to the safe is thinking quickly, and it looks like he's starting to panic, but she can't tell which direction the internal debate is going. Tristan's chest is rising and falling rapidly and the fur on his tail is standing up like a bottle-brush. That must be another unconscious reflex; the occupants of her man's body are too busy in their internal engagement to do anything on purpose. 

She's said all she needs to say, which is coincidentally everything she can think of. The Boss sighs, short and to-the-point like she does everything, then takes off Tristan's glasses and hands them to Adam. They're both distracted, so feline reflexes don't do anything to stop the Boss slapping Tristan like she's the husband in a cheap comedy, faced with a hysterical wife who's seen a mouse.

The Boss feels bad to be hitting her beloved, even for a practical purpose. Jack had immediately recognized that motherly love could come in the form of a takedown hold as well as a tender embrace. That's why she took Jack on as her protégé, and why he's functionally her adopted son,. Half a world away, without a mother's touch, Adam turned out exactly the same, plus claws. Tristan had been the Boss' single experiment with tenderness, proof that softness didn't mean she'd gone soft. He had looked so surprised, back then, for touch to come to his body gently and with an open hand. Now, a slap; in the moment Tristan looks surprised, but he doesn't look betrayed. 

Most important: he looks like _him._ Tristan stares at her with love and awe in his grey-blue eyes, brimming with unshed tears; it's rare for the Boss to doubt she can accomplish a mission, but she wonders if anyone could be the woman that her man sees when he looks at her.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

"Good; you're back. Let's get moving."

A quick command doesn't end the crisis, but the Boss didn't expect it to; you have to rule out the easiest course of action first. Tristan's face doesn't get scrunched up and ugly when he cries, neither is it the affected dry sobs of someone who's trying to gain cheap sympathy but keep her mascara. When he cries it's like an overspill of sadness that had to leak out his eyes, even while he's giving her the best smile he can find. It's a faint one now, and his hand keeps rubbing _sorry_ on his chest while he bows his head to avoid her eyes.

On an average mission, the Boss isn't the one who comforts the stricken. Now that their ghost benefactor has finally fucked off, she has to do it _again._ She's made a realistic assessment of her strengths and knows she's much better prepared to fireman's lift an injured comrade out of physical danger, but that isn't the situation, is it? The Boss shrugs her rifle to her back; it always helps to have your hands free.

"You have a weakness," she agrees, jumping on top of all the apologizing. When she runs her hands through her man's hair it doesn't take long to get from his hairline to his ears, these days. Age looks good on him, and better than the alternative, ghosts be damned. Tristan's ocelot ears have already proven themselves to be good handles; here in the last stretch of a mission, the Boss uses them to tip his face up to hers.

"You have a weakness." She'd be lying otherwise, and the pain in his eyes is acute, but not affronted. When did she become able to tell the different kinds of sadness in a beloved face? "And it got the best of you because your strength saved the entire team, Tristan. Don't wallow."

Adam's been lurking around his parents, dutifully watching the Boss' six while she focuses her attention and hoping he won't get tagged in to help. Adam has a good poker face, but in times of great stress, a young cat-man's tail is a giveaway. The Boss takes her bandana and wipes the tears off of Tristan's face, then holds her hand out. Their son returns Tristan's glasses almost immediately, confirming Adam's attention. Good.

"Adam. Both of you: go bring the truck around." It isn't make-work; Tristan can drive just fine and Adam's a good triggerman, despite the fun he has pretending to be a cowboy. A voice is quicker than Morse code, if they need to radio in, and of course the Boss prefers to have her men watch each others' backs. 

Her medium is at extra risk to get sapped by the spirit world; that's noted. She doesn't send the End into close combat, or make Jack go undercover at an art auction, and any operator with a rifle could take down one of the Cobras at any time. Herself included, but as long as she can, the Boss will get back up. After this long, she's able to admit: it's easier with a buddy.

Once her boys get clear of the building, there won't be as much ghost interference on the airwaves. The Boss has had enough of her metaphysical questions answered to make a swami jealous, so she knows that if a given spirit roamed long corridors in life, they like to keep doing it afterward. The Kemonomimi Project would have done better as a whole if they'd let their people run around outside, animal-men and staff inclusive. The Boss has always believed in the curative power of physical exercise and fresh air; it's done wonders for Adam, and even the Fury seems happier once he takes his helmet off. 

Cause and effect may go the other way around with the Fury, but if the Cobra Unit needs a shrink, the Boss will shoulder that burden: she'll go right out and conscript one. She's accomplished enough here for one day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Honey, what's wrong? Is it ghosts again?" _*sad smile, nod*_
> 
> Sorry for the slow speed; I have notes and outlines, I swear, but beyond my usual problems, being an expendable worker seems to be messing with my ~creative focus~.


	16. OH LAWD SHE C O M I N

The Cobra Unit slithers its way across Europe, heading East in a series of small, deniable engagements. This isn't their first time in this theater of operations, but the Cold War has different rules than a World War. It serves their purpose now to keep their actions quiet. This mission is personal on the Boss' side, and their enemy has its own reason to cover up their losses. 

The enemy can't be neatly sorted by their uniforms like they used to be, but the Boss has had her suspicions confirmed long ago: that was always window dressing. The Boss knows that the holders of real power don't care about flags and anthems until they're using nationalism as another goad for the masses. They can kill one man or one cat-man, no problem, but nobody can loop a literal control pole around a million throats. Rulers have been trying for that one since Caligula, and the state-of-the-art has grown no more delicate than the binary live/die of global nuclear destruction.

The Boss isn't a subtle woman, but she doesn't like negotiations dancing around the threat of mass death at the push of a button. You end up just as dead as if you'd caught a bullet or a well-aimed kick, but there's no personal touch, no face to haunt your killer's conscience. Maybe being around Tristan again is turning her into a romantic after all.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

Sharing a mission always knits the Boss' unit together. There are no more idle hands to be gremlins in the works, no time for rust to set in on their mettle. It seasons her recruits too. Adam is strong at her side, a natural extension of her power as though he grew right from her. As he did. He's self-directed, like he was born to be; she knows her son is with her of his own free will. On the other side there's Jack, who has had to soak up more instruction but came around just the same. The Boss is ready to give the Kemonomimi Project feedback about their methods, but the time for stern letters has passed. Arson is another universal language, and the Fury is eager for the Boss' dictation.

The last recruit in her unit is her oldest and also her greenest. That's not accurate: Tristan has years to his credit as a solitary survivor. Her man has never been a soldier, that's all; he only needs a strong commander to direct his unique skills into the team effort. The Boss knows she can meet that challenge. She's easier on him than she is on Adam or Jack, but it's the same way she's been easy on a partisan who up till a war and a week ago was a tailor. The Boss watches herself for weakness here, and none of the Cobra Unit has objected to anything that sneaks past her guard.

For his part, Tristan demonstrates his cat's stealth, his excellence in silent hand to hand, and also turns out to be a good wheelman. He's an even more remarkable driver when she considers how recently he learned to drive. His other special ability is not as straightforward to evaluate, but he still works hard. After the troubling incident at the vault, Tristan proves to all of the Cobras that his ghost control is excellent when the dead don't come upon him so quickly and with so much at stake, or after he's prepared himself for their offense. 

At the edge of the Błędów Desert, the whole unit takes a winding path through the unmarked minefield around an unmarked testing facility. A little dead girl leads them carefully, just as long as she is allowed to hold onto the End's arm with her big furry paws. The Pain's swarm make a discreet curtain for the tiny homemade shoes that stick out behind the woodpile, while Olenka kisses her borrowed grandfather on the whiskery cheek. Tristan hardly stumbles at all after that, when she leaves the world for good and leaves him alone in himself again. 

It's not that he had to improve his skills at shepherding the ghosts; the Boss' cat-man has been doing that on his own for years. Now Tristan is learning that he can let the concerns of this world fall completely aside and concentrate on his specialty. He has the rest of his unit here to watch his back. Tristan's physical body is the Boss' concern, as are they all; as part of being hers, her men have each other.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

The Boss isn't foolhardy enough to announce her vendetta, but she doesn't assume the Philosophers are idiots either, at least not idiots in her favor. Intelligence centers burglarized, consultant scientists and unassuming bookkeepers dead or vanished--somewhere there's a conference room with enough smart people to put the puzzle together. It isn't a surprise when the first large-scale weapons plant the Cobra Unit infiltrates, the kind of "weapons plant" that gets twice-weekly meat deliveries and has acres of forest surrounded by its electric fences, turns up empty.

Some appropriately-frightened cleaning staff don't appear to have been in on the game, but you should never make assumptions. They could be plants, dragging their heels and waiting to report on the Cobras, or they could have been honestly unprepared for the volume of bloodstains and carnivore shit left by the hasty move-out. The Kemonomimi Project isn't getting their deposit back. The Boss authorizes the Fear to get in some practice at being terrifying, as long as everyone ends up in one of the cells at the end. With some cans of human-appropriate food thrown in, they'll last until their relief arrives or their masters come looking. She has other leads to track down.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

Adam is wearing that damn cowboy hat again, but the Boss can see Tristan's ears just fine. They rotate back on Tristan's head like little velvet RADAR dishes, and both her cat-men make the open-mouthed face that reads like a sneer of disgust, if you don't speak ocelot. It's the look of someone with cat blood getting deep into a scent, and the Boss likes it just fine when Tristan does it in bed, where his ears, tail and everything perk up eagerly. The scent here has him cringing, worse than Adam is, but Tristan's darting, hollow eyes mean that there's ghost action, too.

"I wasn't in this base before. Dad either," Adam briefs the Boss without her having to ask, "but there's a fear-stink, and it's getting worse over that-a-way. The spirits have a lot more they want to tell Dad about. Probably better if you keep on, Dad stays here to listen, and I hang back and take dictation. They say there's nobody from the project left here. Well, nobody alive, but the dead people think they have an idea or two where the live ones went."

At times like this, the Boss has to make the choice between being a lover and a commander. She's shouldered a lot of hard decisions in her career and stays ready to be hit by more, so it's a relief she'd never hoped for, having her son step in so naturally to close the gap.

"Good plan," she tells Adam with a brisk nod. Her son returns the nod with a smile. She's never doubted he was hers. No time lost in explanations means she has a moment to put her arm across Tristan's shoulder. She can only tell that he's trembling by feel, her stout-hearted man, but the Boss catches Tristan's keen eyes going in and out of focus, from the concrete hallway they're all standing in to the realm of the restless dead.

"Whatever the ghosts want to say, I want to hear, but they can tell it to you sitting down," the Boss reminds her men and her unseen audience. She waits until Tristan agrees with his own nod before she taps her forehead to his and lets him go. It turns out there's time for affection on the battlefield after all, as long as you don't go to pieces about it.

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

Past the burnt-out file storage, the testing rooms with observers' windows, and the tiny rooms with grates in the middle of the floor, the Boss finds a door that's promisingly thick and sturdy. The lab's cold storage room is still cold, so there's no chance of an accurate time of death for what looks like a rabbit or a rodent kemonomimi, half-covered on a gurney with obvious bullet wounds to his torso. There's a wall of little metal doors that imply other specimens, but the Boss knows from Tristan's tenure as an experiment that they could be years old. That won't help her current mission, but it gives her more souls to avenge.

The refrigeration system is working hard, which means its compressors and fans are loud enough that the Boss doesn't notice the buzzing of the Pain's entourage until most of the swarm has already arrived. Hornets don't like the cold, but they're good at finding things by smell. Blood and meat are a specialty, but the Boss has seen them sniff out everything from urine to formaldehyde at the request of their mammalian queen. 

The Pain arrives a couple of minutes after the first of his girls flew in. As soon as he clears the room, he calls to them to warm themselves inside his suit, and the Boss can enjoy a hornet-free existence, as long as she ignores the faint buzzing. She's had practice at that, and she also knows hornets well enough to know that the Pain is only being theatrical when he directs them by voice. The Pain is a trusted comrade and has earned his dramatic flourishes. He's also been nothing but gracious about two more scent-hunters joining the team.

"Aw. Poor guy," the Pain says, taking in the scene. Hornet intel reports, the Boss understands, are subject to an insect's priorities, so the Pain wastes no time in turning over the room himself. "Poor _kangaroo_ guy."

The Boss has no trouble conceding the deceased's genetic makeup to a stronger zoologist than herself, but the Pain is too pleased about the folder he's found not to wave his sources around for her, with a few re-warmed hornets buzzing around him in his good cheer. "Looks like he gave as good as he got, at least. One of these drawers should have--here! Just a regular dead guy. Shit, look at that head!"

It is a regular dead human that the Pain has found, unceremoniously stuffed into a morgue locker, lab coat and all. Without the context of a sudden evacuation and an outraged kangaroo-man, the Boss would have guessed that cause of death was a baseball bat to the face. She'll give the fallen warrior the dignity of not pulling back the sheet to match his cold, dead paw-feet with the bruising and the shattered bones on his vanquished captor.

"Keycard; _that_ always means something important. If we're real lucky, it'll work at the next place down the road, too. Oh, hey, gum. You want some, Boss?" 

The Boss can allow herself a moment for unproductive musing. The Pain is patting down the corpse, so it falls to her, and to a few of the hornets, to watch the room. There was no one left alive to save here, but now it's one less pin in the Philosophers' map. A hundred or a thousand miles away, just as soon as the Boss gets the specifics, their first victory is still out there waiting.


End file.
